It’s hard to be shocked anymore with it comes to the hyperbolic rhetoric we often hear from the right in Texas. But when elected officials — people in places of responsibility — employ that kind of heated, extremist rhetoric, you really worry about what’s coming. That happened yesterday when former state Rep. Charles Perry was sworn in as the […]
Recent Blogs
What's in the Proposed New Texas Textbooks? Segregation Wasn't All That Bad
What will students learn about segregation if the State Board of Education approves new social studies textbooks publishers have submitted this year for use in Texas public schools? Bowing to the desires of right-wing politicians on the State Board of Education, some of the textbooks give legitimacy to neo-Confederate arguments about “states’ rights” causing the Civil War and the legacy of […]
Florida County Commissioners Discover That Religious Freedom Means Freedom for Everyone, Even Pagans
Religious-right activists celebrated when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year, in a 5-4 decision, that beginning governmental meetings with sectarian prayers doesn’t violate the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins declared: “The court has rejected the idea that as citizens we must check our faith at the entrance to the public square.” Of course, […]
Texas Religious-Right Fundraiser to Feature Morally Challenged Felon
On Tuesday a judge sentenced conservative political commentator and writer Dinesh D’Souza to five years probation, including eight months in a community confinement center, for violating federal campaign finance law. That sentencing comes nearly two years after D’Souza resigned his position as president of The King’s College, a small conservative Christian school in New York. He lost […]
What's in the Proposed New Texas Textbooks? We Got Democracy from Moses
This month’s public hearing at the State Board of Education (SBOE) highlighted serious problems in the proposed new social studies textbooks for Texas public schools. Scholars working with the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund noted many of those problems in extensive reviews of the new textbooks. We released our scholars’ reports on those textbooks September 10. You can […]
