The Independent Network Charismatic is the new Moral Majority, and they have ties to Rick Perry, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.

Courtesy of The Conversation:

INC Christianity is led by a network of popular independent religious entrepreneurs, often referred to as “apostles.” They have close ties, we found, to conservative U.S. politicians, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry and more recently President Donald Trump. 

Charismatic Christians emphasize supernatural miracles and divine interventions, but INC Christianity is different from other charismatics – and other Christian denominations in general – in the following ways:

• It is not focused primarily on building congregations but rather on spreading beliefs and practices through media, conferences and ministry schools. 
• It is not so much about proselytizing to unbelievers as it is about transforming society through placing Christian believers in powerful positions in all sectors of society. 
• It is organized as a network of independent leaders rather than as formally organized denominations.

INC Christianity is the fastest-growing Christian group in America and possibly around the world. Over the 40 years from 1970 to 2010, the number of regular attenders of Protestant churches as a whole shrunk by an average of .05 percent per year, while independent neo-charismatic congregations (a category in which INC groups reside) grew by an average of 3.24 percent per year. 

Its impact, however, is much greater than can be measured in church attendance. This is because INC Christianity is not centrally concerned with building congregations, but spreading beliefs and practices.

Apparently this group has been making millions through seminars, web sales, book sales, music sales, and DVD sales.

And they have been using that money to spread influence.

Most Christian groups in America have seen the role of the church as connecting individuals to God through the saving grace of Jesus and building congregations that provide communities of meaning and belonging through worship services. They also believe in serving and providing for the needs their local communities. Such traditional Christian groups believe that although the world can be improved, it will not be restored to God’s original plan (until Jesus comes back again to rule the Earth).

INC beliefs, however, are different – their leaders are not content simply to connect individuals to God and grow congregations. Most INC Christian groups we studied seek to bring heaven or God’s intended perfect society to Earth by placing “kingdom-minded people” in powerful positions at the top of all sectors of society. 

I will assume that at this point many of you are starting to get a familiar feeling as to where this is all going.

INC leaders have labeled them the “seven mountains of culture.” These include business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion. In this form of “trickle-down Christianity,” they believe if Christians rise to the top of all seven “mountains,” society will be completely transformed.

Bingo!

If you are not yet familiar with the Seven Mountains mandate, then you must be new here as we have talked about it multiple times.

In short:

Seven Mountains dominionism seeks to place Christians in control over the seven forces that shape and control our culture: (1) Business; (2) Government; (3) Media; (4) Arts and Entertainment; (5) Education; (6) Family; and (7) Religion. The reason for this, as Lance Wallnau, the leading advocate for Seven Mountains theology, explained is that Jesus “doesn’t come back until He’s accomplished the dominion of nations.” And the way “dominion of nations” is accomplished is by having Christians gain control of these “seven mountains” in order to install a “virtual theocracy” overseen by “true apostles” who will fight Satan and his Antichrist agenda.

This same philosophy has turned up in a number of religious organizations, and was especially impactful during the Bush Administration.

Sarah Palin is of course an adherent as are many other highly placed politicians, many now it seems working for and with Donald Trump.

Now does the Muslim travel ban make a little more sense?

Currently we are seeing church attendance in America hitting all time lows, but this group does not care about congregations, their goal is to put true believers in positions of great power, and apparently they are succeeding.

So yes Sarah Palin maybe yesterday's news but those who helped to foist her upon us, are getting closer to their ultimate goal everyday.

The Moral Majority is dead.

Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority.

Courtesy of New York Magazine: 

A belief in the connection between personal morality and fitness for office used to be a bedrock of Republican politics. It undergirded the crusade to impeach Bill Clinton, and also supplied the primary theme for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, which promised to restore “honor and dignity” to the presidency. Five years ago, white evangelical Protestants were the most heavily Republican voting bloc in the country, and also its most moralistic. Only 30 percent of them believed that “an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life.” 

But Donald Trump has changed all that. Today, white evangelical Protestants are the least moralistic cohort of voters. According to a new PRRI/Brookings survey, a full 72 percent of them now believe elected officials can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal lives.

This is how the article ends:

Trump has cured what used to be called “the Moral Majority” of its moralism.

So the national Republican party is in tatters, Alaska might vote blue for the first time in forty years, and there is no longer any "moral majority" powerhouse voting block inflicting unqualified candidates on the American people?

What did I do right to deserve so many wonderful gifts?

And do I really owe all of this good fortune to Donald Trump?

Boy am I one confused Liberal.

Evangelicals still supporting Donald Trump after release of sexual harassment tape.

Courtesy of Buzzfeed:  

“Voters of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, create jobs, and oppose the Iran nuclear deal,” Faith and Freedom Coalition president Ralph Reed said in an email to BuzzFeed News. “Ten-year-old tapes of private conversation with a television talk show host rank very low on their hierarchy of concerns.” 

Asked if he had any comment on the tape itself and if he was definitely standing by Trump, Reed said, “I think the statement is self explanatory.” 

Tony Perkins, who leads the Family Research Council, also did not reject Trump in the wake of the revelations, but indicated that he doesn’t share Trump’s values. 

“My personal support for Donald Trump has never been based upon shared values, it is based upon shared concerns about issues such as: justices on the Supreme Court that ignore the constitution, America’s continued vulnerability to Islamic terrorists and the systematic attack on religious liberty that we’ve seen in the last 7 1/2 years,” Perkins said in an email to BuzzFeed News. 

“The comments are obviously disgusting and unfortunate,” Bauer said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “But Donald Trump did not run as a evangelical or as somebody who ran the kind of campaign that a Pat Robertson would run.” 

“We’ll still support him, still work hard for him,” Bauer said. “His policies are 100% better than Hillary clinton’s for the country.” 

“I don’t see how any values voter that is sensible would take a tape from 11 years ago with totally inappropriate language and says somehow that leads me as a voter to stay home or vote for Hillary Clinton or throw your vote away on a third party candidate,” Bauer said. 

To be clear NONE of what is said above surprises me in the least.

In fact the entire reason this blog exists is to call out the hypocrisy of the conservatives and the so-called "Moral Majority." I knew the evangelicals were full of shit when Jerry Falwell was leading them to support Ronald Reagan and then George W. Bush, and they are just as full of shit today.

Just imagine the level of outrage that would have been directed at Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama if even a portion of the disgusting comments voiced by Donald Trump had been uttered by either one of them.

Simply put it would have ended their campaigns months ago, and the entire Democratic party would be tainted by those statements for decades to come.

But, if a GOP candidate says all that and much worse....ho hum.... no big deal....let's move on.

CNN now has a treasure trove of disgusting comments that Donald Trump made on the Howard Stern show, some much much worse than the "grab her pu**y" comments, and those will not change the minds of the evangelicals either.

By the way CNN's John King pointed out quite rightly that Donald Trump did not just make lewd and lascivious remarks, he essentially admitted to a crime.

But that won't make any difference to these people either.

Trump once said that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and it would not cost him any support, apparently he could also rape a woman on that same street and the so-called "Christian" majority in this country would simply turn a blind eye.

In fact Trump is predicting that he will emerge unscathed.

So many self-righteous hypocrites. Watch their poll numbers - and elections - go down!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 9, 2016

Well my fellow heathens, it looks like it is up to us to take this son-of-a-bitch down. 

Samantha Bee with part two of her examination into the history of the Religious Right.

Okay now I really liked this show before, but right now I am nursing a serious admiration boner for Samantha Bee. (Yes admiration boners are a real thing, that I totally just made up for this post.)

She is not only making me miss Jon Stewart less she has inspired me to write a letter to the folks over tat TBS to ask why in the fuck the show is not on five days a week, instead of once.

Dammit I need more programming like this.

Hell we ALL need more programming like this.

Frank Schaeffer writes about the conspiracy of religious home schooling, and how it was shaped to overthrow secular America. (Schaeffer also suggests that all of this helped a certain nobody from Alaska briefly rise to the heights of power.)

Courtesy of Salon:

As someone who participated in the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you that you can’t understand the modern Republican Party and its hatred of government unless you understand the evangelical home-school movement. Nor can the Democrats hope to defeat the GOP in 2016 unless they grasp what I’ll be explaining here: religious war carried on by other means. 

The Christian home-school movement drove the Evangelical school movement to the ever-harsher world-rejecting far right. The movement saw itself as separating from evil “secular” America. Therein lies the heart of the Tea Party, GOP and religious right’s paranoid view of the rest of us. And since my late father and evangelist Francis Schaeffer and I were instrumental in starting the religious right — I have since left the movement and recently wrote a book titled “Why I Am an Atheist who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace“ – believe me when I tell you that the evangelical schools and home school movement were, by design, founded to undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy. 

This happened because Evangelical home-schoolers were demanding ever-greater levels of “separation” from what they regarded as the Evil Secular World. It wasn’t enough just to reject the public schools. How could the Christian parent be sure that even the Evangelical schools were sufficiently pure? And so the Christian schools radicalized in order to not appear to be “compromising” with the world in the eyes of increasingly frightened and angry parents. (My account here of the rise of the home school movement is not aimed at home-schooling, per se, but at parents who want to indoctrinate, rather than educate.)

Schaeffer then goes into incredible detail as to how the religious home school  movement came to be, and how it has shaped policy in this country, as well as inspiring a new wave of evangelism, attacks against public schools, and helped create religious and conservative heroes.

And guess who one of those heroes happened to be?

Yep you guessed it. 

In the first decade of the 21st century the Evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic (and Mormon) outsider victim “approach” to public policy was perfected on a heretofore-undreamed-of scale by Sarah Palin. She was the ultimate holier-than-thou Evangelical. What my mother had represented (in her unreconstructed fundamentalist heyday) to a chalet full of young gullible women and later to tens of thousands of readers, Palin became for tens of millions of alienated, angry, white lower-middle-class men and women convinced that an educated “elite” was out to get them. 

Palin was first inflicted on the American public by Sen. John McCain, who chose her as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election for at least one big reason: He needed to shore up flagging support from the Evangelical Republican antiabortion base. McCain wanted to prove that he was fully in line with the “social issues” agenda that Dad, Koop and I had foisted on our country more than 30 years before. Palin lost the election for McCain but “won” her war for fame and fortune. 

She presented herself as called by God and thus cast in the Old Testament mold of Queen Esther, one chosen by God to save her people. Palin perfected the Jesus Victim “art” of Evangelical self-banishment and then took victimhood to new levels of “success” by cashing in on white lower-middle-class resentment of America’s elites. 

Palin made a fortune by simultaneously proclaiming her Evangelical faith, denouncing liberals and claiming that she would help the good God-fearing folks out there “take back” their country. This “Esther” lacked seriousness. But born-again insiders knew that the “wisdom of men” wasn’t the point. Why should the new Queen Esther bother to actually finish her work governing Alaska? God had chosen her to confound the wise! 

So she became a media star and quit as governor of Alaska. Then she battled “Them”—the “lamestream media” (as she labeled any media outlets outside of the Far Right subculture)—in the name of standing up for “Real Americans.” Palin used the alternative communication network that had its roots deeply embedded in those pioneering 1970s and 1980s Evangelical TV shows and radio shows that I used to be on just about every other day. She did this to avoid being questioned by people who didn’t agree with her. By not actually governing or doing the job she’d been elected by Alaskans to do, and by using the alternative media networks as an “outsider”—all the while reacting to and demanding attention from the actual (theoretically hated) media—Palin also made buckets of money.

So in a nutshell these religious zealots used homeschooling to disenfranchise and under educate a segment of Americans to such an extent that they began to see themselves as detached from the rest of society in such a way that it made them the perfect targets for unsavory politicians, con-men, and grifters to take advantage.

Cue Sarah Louis Palin.

God they never had a chance.

P.S. Doesn't this put an interesting spin on that Jon Stewart interview with Mike Huckabee that I posted yesterday?

Remembering when it was not abortion or homophobia that united the Fundamentalists. It was segregation.

Pamphlets handed out in churches during the early sixties.

Every once in awhile I like to remind people that the Religious Right that helped to get Ronald Reagan elected to the presidency in 1980, did not get its start as a political movement that embraced conservationism, pro-life, and an anti-homosexual agenda.

No there was a time when none of those issues even registered with the Fundamentalists.

As Frank Schaeffer likes to remind people, it was he and his father who helped shape the Evangelical pro-life movement, and it was they, working under the banner of the "Moral Majority," who made it the main issue that Republicans ran on in the 1980's.

But before that what united that group of folks was not "killing" unborn babies. No it is the possibility that there might be some babies born with "mixed blood."

And the father of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, was one of the worst agitators:

Like many Southern White ministers, Falwell didn’t sit on the sidelines at the outset of the modern civil rights movement, he joined the opposition. 

“Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church,” Max Blumenthal writes in an insightful article in The Nation magazine. “This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naively unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race –not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called ‘values’ issues – that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.” 

Four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregated public schools, Falwell gave a speech titled, “Segregation or Integration.” 

His message was unmistakably clear: “If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn the line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

This was the issue that originally united the Southern white Evangelicals together, and it continues to permeate the conservative party to this day.

So is it really any wonder that Fox News clearly shows a racial bias in their coverage?

Of course not. Because their main demographic is older conservative white folks who were raised in churches where those pamphlets were common place, and the pastor's sermons were peppered, not with warnings about premarital sex or the homosexual agenda, but instead with the need to keep the races from mingling at to keep God's people pure.

"The Bible Belt is collapsing." The sweetest words I have heard all day.

Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal:  

'The Bible Belt is collapsing," says Russell Moore. Oddly, the incoming president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission doesn't seem upset. In a recent visit to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Moore explains that he thinks the Bible Belt's decline may be "bad for America, but it's good for the church." 

Why? Because "we are no longer the moral majority. We are a prophetic minority." 

The phrase is arresting coming from such a prominent religious leader—akin to a general who says the Army has shrunk to the point it can no longer fight two wars. A youthful 41, Mr. Moore is among the leaders of a new generation who think that evangelicals need to recognize that their values no longer define mainstream American culture the way they did 50 or even 20 years ago. 

On gay marriage, abortion, even on basic religious affiliation, the culture has moved away. So evangelicals need a new way of thinking—a new strategy, if you will—to attract and keep believers, as well as to influence American politics. 

The easy days of mobilizing a ready-made majority are gone. By "prophetic minority," he means that Christians must return to the days when they were a moral example and vanguard—defenders of belief in a larger unbelieving culture. He views this less as a defeat than as an opportunity. 

To illustrate his point, Mr. Moore tells the story about a friend from college two decades ago, an atheist, who asked for the name of a church that wasn't very demanding of its congregation. When Mr. Moore inquired why, the friend said he needed a church to attend because he planned to run for governor some day. Mr. Moore says the story shows that in the past you had to join a church even if you had no belief because everyone else belonged. But today his friend wouldn't feel so obliged because "the idea that to be a good person, to be a good American, you have to go to church" has largely disappeared.

I agree with Mr. Moore's conclusion that people no longer feel that attending church is necessary to project to others that they are a "good person." But of course I would also argue that many of those who use religion to convince others of their morality are often morally bankrupt, and simply use that as an ethical camouflage. 

This is just one more step forward toward the day when there will no longer be a religious test for those seeking higher political office. Which of course is exactly the way the Founding Fathers intended it to be.

Wresting the mantle of moral superiority from the Evangelicals has been a lifelong dream of mine and I could not be happier to see them losing influence. That is nothing but good news for the future of this nation.

It is getting closer to the day when I can discard my "The Immoral Minority" masthead and replace it with "The Immoral Majority." A name which I believe to have been more accurate all along.

The truth behind the push for "School Choice."

Courtesy of Salon:  

To still relatively scant notice, the call for “School Choice” or Vouchers continues to play out in state capitols across the nation in an effort to increase Biblically based education through a redirection of tax dollars from public to private religious schools. In order to accomplish the end goal of Christianizing all students, stealth remains largely the rule of the day. In 2002, Dick DeVos told The Heritage Foundation.

“We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities. Many of the activities and the political work that needs to go on will go on at the grass roots. It will go on quietly and it will go on in the form that often politics is done – one person at a time, speaking to another person in privacy. And so these issues will not be, maybe, as visible or as noteworthy, but they will set a framework within states for the possibility of action on education reform issues.” 

During the 2011-2012 school year, thirty-two private school choice programs were in place with more than $800 million available for vouchers and scholarship tax credits, money that by all rights should have gone to our public school systems, many of which are in dire need. Groups with heart-warming names like The Alliance for School Choice and American Federation for Children encourage naive donors to support vouchers for reasons that are as deceptive as they are fundamentally non-democratic. 

Additionally, over the years, far too many of these overzealous Christians have quietly insinuated themselves onto School Boards across the country and are hard at work challenging the historical mandate to provide a religion-neutral public education by insuring that the Bible become part of high school curricula. 

In 2007, a piece of legislation backed by the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ and the American Family Association, passed in the Texas State House. The bill stated that Texas public schools must offer, as required curriculum the “history and literature of the Old and New Testaments.” Recently, the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) issued a chilling report on a study they coordinated with Mark Chancey, Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University. 

In his report, Chancey stated that “at least 57 (Texas) school districts and three charter schools taught courses about the Bible in 2011-12, a number that more than doubled the districts teaching such courses in the 2006-07 school year.” The oversight spelled out in the bill that should have protected students from religious indoctrination was largely ignored leaving whole districts with Biblically driven curricula. At the time of the bill’s implementation, the bill’s co-author, Rep. Leo Berman, blatantly stated, “I don’t believe there’s such a thing as the separation of church and state.” 

Of particular concern is the textbook-like use of scripture to condone homophobia, to slander blacks and Jews, and to deny basic climate and evolutionary science. And Texas is not alone. According to The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools’ website over a half a million students have already taken these courses nationally for credit. Take a half a million public school minds along with those who are already enrolled in religious schools or who are homeschooled, multiply it by a decade and it’s easy to see why it matters.

This agenda to undermine public education and reintroduce Christianity into the classrooms was the brain child of Jerry Falwell and the so-called Moral Majority, back in the 1980's. And even after Falwell's death it continues apace.

This is why on the local level it is important to keep the Fundamentalists out of our school boards and fight at every turn the idea of charter schools, school vouchers, and "teaching the controversy."

If we are not vigilant these anti-education trolls will destroy the very foundation of America's educational system in the hopes of keeping them ignorant and uninformed enough to continue voting Republican candidates, and continuing to support old fashioned religious faiths that are soon to go the way of the dinosaurs.

And that would be the ACTUAL dinosaurs, not those silly animatronic ones they have hanging out with primitive people at the Creation Museum.

Dinosaurs and humans were NEVER alive at the same time, but you will not learn that in many charter schools.

The pro-life movement has its roots, not in fighting abortion, but fighting desegregation.

Courtesy of Salon:  

As the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wadepassed, evangelical leaders marked the occasion with histories of how their community took up the anti-abortion cause. Mark Galli, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, has suggested the movement formed out of grassroots reflection on “the terrible and inevitable consequences of legalized abortion.” Albert Mohler, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president, insisted it arose from moral outrage triggered by Roe v. Wade. 

Both histories provide pristine portraits of the origins of the evangelical right, suggesting its founders based their advocacy on scholarly assessments and aspired to noble political ends. But a history can be told that is significantly less flattering. 

The right-wing evangelical movement was not an immediate backlash to Roe v. Wade. The evangelical community, unlike Roman Catholicism, showed little interest in combating abortion until almost 1980. As Jerry Falwell lamented in 1979, “The Roman Catholic Church for many years has stood virtually alone against abortion. I think it’s an indictment against the rest of us that we’ve allowed them to stand alone.” 

Although evangelicals were mostly silent on abortion after Roe v. Wade, they were not silent on other political issues. Paul Weyrich, one of the evangelical right’s most influential founders, recalls that the movement initially emerged to defend racially segregated Christian schools from government intrusion: 

[W]hat galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation. 

In other words, as Randall Balmer has succinctly put it: “the religious right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.” 

Only after the movement was underway did it begin advocacy on abortion. It did so, in large part, based on highly dubious arguments advanced by the popular writer Francis Schaeffer.

You know I started to write something about this very thing about a year ago, but I had trouble finding the information online that I needed.

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck may seem like court jesters to most of us, but we must never forget that this is the very real threat they pose to America.

From Truthout:

Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on "biblical law," and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication of social deviants, beginning with homosexuals, and moving on to immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims and those they dismiss as "nominal Christians"—meaning Christians who do not embrace their perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible. Those who defy the mass movement are condemned as posing a threat to the health and hygiene of the country and the family. All will be purged.

The followers of deviant faiths, from Judaism to Islam, must be converted or repressed. The deviant media, the deviant public schools, the deviant entertainment industry, the deviant secular humanist government and judiciary and the deviant churches will be reformed or closed. There will be a relentless promotion of Christian "values," already under way on Christian radio and television and in Christian schools, as information and facts are replaced with overt forms of indoctrination. The march toward this terrifying dystopia has begun. It is taking place on the streets of Arizona, on cable news channels, at tea party rallies, in the Texas public schools, among militia members and within a Republican Party that is being hijacked by this lunatic fringe.

Those who remain in a reality-based world often dismiss these malcontents as buffoons and simpletons. They do not take seriously those, like Beck, who pander to the primitive yearnings for vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. Critics of the movement continue to employ the tools of reason, research and fact to challenge the absurdities propagated by creationists who think they will float naked into the heavens when Jesus returns to Earth. The magical thinking, the flagrant distortion in interpreting the Bible, the contradictions that abound within the movement's belief system and the laughable pseudoscience, however, are impervious to reason. We cannot convince those in the movement to wake up. It is we who are asleep.

The Texas Board of Education approves a new social studies and history curriculum that will certainly receive the Teabagger "seal of approval".

From TPM:

 The State Board of Education has adopted new social studies and history guidelines for Texas high school classrooms.

The standards have been given a more conservative bent by the board. They dictate how political events and figures will be taught to some 4.8 million schoolchildren in Texas and beyond for the next decade.

The standards also will be used by textbook publishers who often develop materials for other states based on those approved in Texas.

The debate has brought national attention to the effort, which this week featured testimony from educators, civil rights leaders and a former U.S. education secretary.

...conservatives scored a string of victories late Thursday, including a requirement that public school students in Texas evaluate efforts by global organizations such as the United Nations to undermine U.S. sovereignty.

McLeroy, one of the board's most outspoken conservatives, offered the amendment requiring students to evaluate efforts by global organizations including the U.N. to undermine U.S. sovereignty, saying they threatened individual liberty and freedom.

With little criticism from Democrats on the board, conservatives added language that would require students to discuss the solvency of "long-term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare."
During the monthslong process, conservatives also have successfully strengthened the requirements on teaching the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers and attempted to water down rationale for the separation of church and state. If adopted, the standards will refer to the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic," and students will be required to study the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.

In previous discussions, the board has added language heralding "American exceptionalism" and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best without excessive government intervention. It also required students learn to about the Second Amendment right to bear arms specifically, in addition to the Bill of Rights. And they removed a suggestion that students learn about hip-hop as an example of a significant social movement.

They also agreed to delete a requirement that sociology students "explain how institutional racism is evident in American society."

Educators have blasted the proposed curriculum for politicizing education. Teachers also have said the document is too long and will force students to memorize lists of names rather than thinking critically.

Taking over school boards was one of the stated goals of the Moral Majority.  They believed that if they could bring their religious viewpoints and moral beliefs into the public schools they could drag this country away from the "immorality" of the new millennium and back to their romantic ideal of the 50's.  That would be the 1850's to be precise.

I have no doubt that Jerry Falwell is sitting in the hottest section of hell right now with a huge smile on his chubby face.

And if you think my point is mere hyperbole let me direct you to a this video which shows School Board member Cynthia Dunbar opening the debate over social studies with a very telling prayer.



Any questions?