This Is Probably An Interesting Blog (but in the offhand chance it isn't…)

The Texas Board of Education has seemingly succeeded in changing the state’s curriculum to add more emphasis on conservative and religious figures. This excerpt was striking:

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

[...]

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

This is one of those palm-to-the-face moments, which wouldn’t seem so disappointing if the decisions of the Texas Board of Education didn’t affect almost every other state in the union. But most infuriating for any student of history should be the rewriting of our past regarding the separation of Church and State, which was actually proposed to Thomas Jefferson by Anabaptists, Quakers and Baptists seeking freedom and protection from persecution by Calvinist theocracies that governed early American communities. In other words, the Separation of Church and State wasn’t championed to keep religion out of government, but government out of the free practice of religion.

Anyone with a library card or basic access to the internet could research this stuff.

And we wonder why we’re falling behind.