[WT Sharpe]

The Texas School Board fiasco has been going on all year, and it doesn't appear to be letting up. Religious fundamentalists have been proposing amendment after amendment on social issues to weaken standards drawn up by professional educators with the intention of introducing a partisan political slant into the textbooks. Jefferson's "wall of separation" between Church as been attacked, as has the importance of Jefferson himself. Young-Earth creationists on the school board have demanded that in textbooks evolution be labeled "only a theory" (a clear misunderstanding as to the meaning in science of what a theory actually is, confusing the scientific term with its colloquial usage). They want the textbooks to reflect that the United States was founded upon Christianity, when in truth it was founded in the midst of the Age of Enlightenment and it's Constitution was the first in modern Western civilization to specify that its power was derived from "We the people" -- a most remarkable deviation from the earlier European concept of rule by the divine right of kings. (It's true that many of the founders were Christian, but many were not.) In short, they want to re-write both history and science texts and indoctrinate the children in their dogma. And as Texas is the largest single-buyer of textbooks, as goes Texas, so goes the nation.