Meet Cynthia Dunbar, the woman behind the Texas History Textbook Massacre.

http://gawker.com/5540483/meet-the-crusader-behind-texas-textbook-whitewash

Dunbar was elected to the state board of education for her evangelical Christian credentials, but no real surprise there because we already know that Texas has a large number of crazies in positions of power. A proponent of home and Christian private schooling, Dunbar says that sending kids to public schools is like "throwing them in to the enemy's flames." But because of the sheer number of the state's textbook purchases, the changes suggested by Dunbar could eventually reach most of the states in America.

The Guardian quotes Dunbar as saying:

In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections."

What kind of corrections? Some pretty big ones!

* Remember that thing called the slave trade? Well, it turns out what you learned was all wrong, because it wasn't some evil buying and selling of human beings, it was simply "Atlantic triangular trade."
* The Civil Rights Movement created "unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes" for minorities in America. And Martin Luther King, Jr? Pretty much a Black Panther.
* Thomas Jefferson? He was an insignificant, God-hating heathen who made sure that church and state remained separate.
* Senator Joe McCarthy was right to go after the Godless commies in Hollywood and Washington. He will be vindicated.
* The right to bear arms is essential to democracy and kids really need to learn this in school.
* Sir Isaac Newton didn't know shit. We have military technology to thank for America's successes in science. So please, take the time to write Lockheed Martin and let them know that you appreciate everything they do for America.
* Along with military technology, America can only flourish economically through "minimal government intrusion and taxation."
* Capitalism was once a great word, but has been dragged through the mud by liberals. We now call it "free enterprise."
* The Israel-Palestine conflict? Blame the whole thing on a bunch of dang fundamentalist Muslims.
* Moses had a greater influence on the US Constitution than Thomas Jefferson did.

*Facepalm into headdesk into bangheadagainstwall*


Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Bill Hicks and Douglas Adams are dead, and yet this fetid sack of willful ignorance, outright stupidity, and Talibaniacal fanatacism still walks the earth?

It was a large part of the reason I wrote my LTTE to the Globe. What a piece of shit this woman is. She needs to be flushed down the toilet of the religious right's cesspool of self-aggrandisement like so many others. The only solution I can see is that another group of states, perhaps New England or the Pacific Northwest, should design their own textbooks and see what they can come up with.

Here's the thread I posted about my LTTE. I thought I was very creative in my solution!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8350693

*I* learned "Atlantic triangular trade" in Illinois 25+ years ago: cotton for rum for slaves, or some permutation. I grew up just fine. Believe racism is wrong. Finishing my PhD at an ivy league school. And it all started with Atlantic Triangular Trade.

Any teacher worths his/her salt would specify what the materials traded were. Any half curious kid would ask. I have never known a single teacher, even the worst ones, who only taught the book and directly from the book and nothing but the book. I am sure they are out there, and the Texas taliban is probably trying to find and hire them all, but I suspect that that one particular "correction" isn't as bad as the Brits make it out to be.