By Felicia Martin
President & Executive Director, Texas Freedom Network
Texas crossed a dangerous line in the separation of church and state that should alarm every parent, teacher, student, and anyone who cares about the future of our public schools. State leaders announced a formal partnership with Turning Point USA to create “Club America” chapters in every public high school across the state. From the Governor’s Mansion, the governor, lieutenant governor, and education commissioner promised “meaningful disciplinary action” against any school that hesitates to allow these clubs.
As the executive director of Texas Freedom Network, an organization that has defended public education for thirty years, I want to be clear about what this moment represents. This is the state of Texas using public power and public institutions to advance an explicitly political and religious nationalist agenda. It is also about punishing anyone who dares to question or resist it.
And it is happening at the same time the state has banned LGBTQIA+ student groups, restricted teachers’ ability to teach fact-based history, and launched investigations into educators’ personal speech. When a government decides which viewpoints young people are permitted to explore and which are forbidden, it is not promoting freedom. It is enforcing ideology.
Turning Point USA is not a neutral civic education group. It is a political organization known for promoting Christian nationalist narratives, attacking educators, and publicizing a “professor watchlist” that encourages harassment of teachers who do not conform to its worldview.
The state’s embrace of this organization, combined with threats directed at administrators who follow their district’s regular approval processes for student clubs, crosses a constitutional line. A government cannot decide which political beliefs are allowed to flourish in public schools. That is the very opposite of the First Amendment’s purpose.
Governor Abbott attempted to compare Turning Point USA to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but that comparison reveals more than it hides. FCA chapters are initiated by students and operate without state interference. What Abbott proposed is entirely different. Abbott told schools that refusing or delaying a Turning Point club should be reported to the Texas Education Agency. That is not support for student expression. It is coercion.
Once a state uses its institutions, funding, and disciplinary systems to guarantee the success of a single political organization, it stops being a neutral guardian of public education. It becomes a participant in ideological recruitment.
This announcement came only months after the state banned LGBTQIA+ student clubs, removing essential support structures for students who already face disproportionate bullying and mental health challenges. That contradiction is not incidental. It is intentional.
If the state can outlaw a club designed to support LGBTQIA+ youth while simultaneously requiring schools to accommodate a political organization that has promoted rhetoric hostile to those same students, then the message is unmistakable. These actions follow a single logic. They define who belongs in Texas and who does not. Some identities are valued and protected. Others are treated as threats.
What is happening in Texas is not an isolated event. Officials in Oklahoma and Florida have launched similar partnerships with Turning Point. These efforts join a larger campaign of book bans, surveillance of teachers, and attempts to control how schools discuss race, gender, and American history.
This is the quiet, bureaucratic form of authoritarianism. Not dramatic announcements. Not overt acts of repression. Instead, it is the methodical use of state power to enforce a single worldview, intimidate dissent, and constrain pluralism in the spaces where young people learn who they are.
Public education rests on a simple promise. Schools belong to all of us. Students are not political pawns. Teachers are not enemies of the state. And constitutional rights do not disappear at the schoolhouse door.
If Texas continues down this path, our schools will not be spaces where young people discover their identity and potential. They will become spaces where the state dictates who they must be, and punishes those who refuse to conform.
That is not freedom. It is not education. And it is not the Texas our young people deserve.
