This past week, the Texas State Board of Education — whose decisions on textbook content affect not only Texas, but schools nationwide (due to the number of Texas students and the fact that they make decisions at a state rather than local level) — voted that textbook content be changed to more reflect the board’s radical conservative political agenda. Included in this, is removal of Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence, and third U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson, from their history books as an influential political philosopher. Due apparently, to his crime of being the primary author of the doctrine of the Separation of Church and State. The board also wishes students to question the legitimacy of that essential founding doctrine.

Right-wing conservatives are crying that American Freedom, Liberty, and Democracy are being taken away (because they lost a free, democratic election to the majority - Liberty is apparently only protected when their candidates win — i.e., only if the U.S. were a one party Republican State, would democracy flourish, in their minds). It should come as a literal red flag, that far right Republicans/Tea Party-style activists, are now following the path of Stalin, Mao, and Goebbels, in revising taught history to reflect their political agenda, rather than the truth.

For those who wish to pick-and-choose their Founding Fathers, and forget why the Separation of Church and State is important, below is a depiction of the dangers of the excesses when the majority feels it can impose its religion upon everyone else in a community. The below cartoon pair is from the Boston publication Scraps, issue #6, 1835, by David Claypoole Johnston, illustrating a wave of anti-catholic violence then happening in Massachusetts.

Click on either picture, to see an enlarged version of their original configuration.

Let us not also forget the Spanish Inquisition, the pilgrims fleeing of state-religion to follow their own beliefs in America, and then those same well-meaning pilgrims giving us the Salem Witch Trials. All of which persuaded a need for a Separation of Church and State. But then, you’d have to know history, to know that. And that’s exactly what the current members of the Texas State Board of Education, do not want students to learn.

Doug Wheeler