Texas learns them thinkin’ books what history means (no Mexicans!)

This is from a few days ago, and you’re probably already aware that Texas is fucking up their state’s school curriculum – and by proxy the entire nation’s – but this story can’t go unmentioned at this blog.  Hey, reality, you ready for Justice, Tey-HAS style!?

Hold on to your asses, homos, and get ready for some history the way God intended: unshakled by reality, and used to further marginalize the oppressed.  Bang bang!!!  The New York Times reports:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

This new curriculum is perfect for parents who were sick of sending their children to school to learn new things.  Much better to teach them to respect authority, not question the power of the state, and redact those troublesome elements of history that challenge your philosophy.  And it turns out there are a lot of elements of history that challenge the right-wing mindset.  They must be heroically ignored, for posterity. 

That is to say: fuck Thomas Jefferson, let’s get that monster out of our children’s learnin’ boxes.

TFNinsider recorded the Education Board’s meeting this way [via ThinkProgress]:

9:30 — … Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – … The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today. [emphasis added.]

Hahaha, where’s your God now, Tommy?  Oh, you don’t really believe in him?  Well, serves you right, then. 

Members also attempted to ”remove references to hip hop,” which they lost.  To be fair, leading right-wing intellectuals recently claimed that American slavery “never became part of the national psyche,” so, I guess they were just holding the party line.      

 Don’t think it was just blacks who the board wants to further marginalize.  They’ve had enough of those queers to, or whatever it is they want to be called nowadays [via TP]:

To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”  

YEEEEE-HAW!  Pow pow pow!  Boy howdy, the transgendered are finally getting what’s coming to them.  It’s about time that powerful special interest was taken down a notch or two. 

(If anyone wants to get a posse together and make every Republican member of the board listen to this heartbreaking episode of This American Life in which two transgendered 8-year-olds become friends — let’s form a meet-up.)

And because it’d be a shame if anyone escaped the vile ignorance of the right wing, it’s worth noting that they don’t care for Latinos either.  From the New York Times again:

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.” 

“This is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist” has been the GOP’s platform for 20 years, why change it now?