Keep an eye out for the Texas Freedom Network booth in the exhibit hall at Netroots Nation this week in Austin! Meet staff members and learn about our organization.

TFN Deputy Director Ryan Valentine

This weekend TFN Deputy Director Ryan Valentine will speak at Netroots Nation on two separate panels:

Fighting for Progressive Values in Texas (Friday, 1:30 p.m.)

What Ever Happened to the Religious Left? (Saturday, 4:30 p.m.)

We look forward to seeing you there!… Read More

We told you on Monday that the House Public Education Committee had scheduled a hearing for 9 a.m. this morning about the State Board of Education. Ryan Valentine, the Texas Freedom Network's deputy director, is testifying for TFN today. Here's an excerpt: Over the past 13 years, and especially in the past 12 months, we have watched the state board’s focus on educating Texas schoolchildren become diverted with unnecessary and divisive debates over politics and the personal agendas of some of its members. The board has become increasingly dysfunctional. Its important work has become bogged down and undermined by secretive political maneuvering that is arrogantly disrespectful of teachers, of established rules and open processes, and even of the law itself. Read More

The political antics of the far-right faction that now controls the Texas State Board of Education has been attracting a lot of attention in the press. The faction has managed to make work on everything from adopting mathematics textooks to revising language arts and science curriculum standards strained and controversial. Unnecessary fights over those and other issues have undermined progress on the increasingly dysfunctional board.

This weekend the Houston Chronicle published a scathing editorial that scorched the board for undermining efforts to protect the religious freedom of students in public school elective classes about the Bible’s influence in history and literature:

In its 2007 session, the Texas Legislature managed to do something remarkable. It passed a broadly supported bill that allows school districts to develop academically rigorous courses on the Bible as literature, and it included carefully crafted safeguards to prevent schools from using the classes to teach religion or proselytize.

It took many hours of hard work and negotiation by members of the House Committee on Public Education to amend a bill written by Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, which sought to make the Bible classes mandatory for every school… Read More

Last year the Texas Legislature told the State Board of Education to create new, specific curriculum standards for high school elective courses about the Bible’s influence in history and literature. That was one of a number of safeguards for religious freedom that lawmakers put into the bill. In March, however, the state board decided it wants public schools to continue relying on vague, very general standards that social studies and literature teachers use to craft “independent studies” courses on a variety of topics. The board did so despite the intent of the legislation and despite research from the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund showing that most Texas public schools that already rely on those vague standards end up with Bible classes that are really about the religious views of the teacher. Even worse, students in those classes may even find their own religious beliefs disparaged by the teacher and classroom materials.

Unfortunately, the Texas Attorney General’s Office yesterday said those general standards would comply with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution anyway. (That’s no surprise. The standards are… Read More

Sarah Posner, who compiles The American Prospect’s always-informative “The FundamentaList,” a round-up of religious-right stories each week, interviews Jeff Sharlet, an expert on the media’s coverage of religion, about his new book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

As Posner writes:

The Family exposes the inner workings of an elite and secretive association of politicos (The Family boasts a bipartisan but mostly Republican roster of members, including Sens. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, and Mark Pryer, an Arkansas Democrat) and business executives (such as the CEOs of Continental Oil and the defense contractor Raytheon) who have exploited their uber-masculine, uber-capitalist version of Christianity to serve political and profit-making goals, from union-busting here at home to imperialist adventures abroad.

. . .

The Family is best known to the public for its annual National Prayer Breakfast, a seemingly innocuous event routinely attended by presidents and members of Congress.

Read the interview. Also check out TFN’s report on the National Day of Prayer (.pdf!).

Posner also authored a new book this year, God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and… Read More