Did He Bother to Read the Law First?

When the Texas State Board of Education approved controversial new social studies curriculum standards last year, far-right board members patted themselves on the back for requiring that students learn about the Constitution. Of course, Texas students were already required to do that. But state board members were simply trying to distract attention from the way they had manipulated the standards to promote their own personal and political biases on a host of issues (including their own distorted interpretations of the Constitution they claim to hold so dear).

Well, state Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Van, is still pushing the right-wing myth that Texas students aren’t learning about the Constitution. Flynn’s House Bill 2362 would require that high school seniors “complete a course on the United States Constitution as part of a district’s social studies curriculum.”

News flash for Rep. Flynn: such a course is already part of the required curriculum in Texas high schools. It’s called U.S. Government.

And if that’s not enough, students also learn about the Constitution in their (required) U.S. history classes. Flynn can read the requirement for those courses in the same chapter of the Education Code he’s now trying to amend.

Is it too much to ask that lawmakers like Rep. Flynn stop wasting everybody’s time with this kind of political grandstanding? After all, the Legislature has real problems to solve — like keeping our kids’ public schools open and their teachers employed.

5 thoughts on “Did He Bother to Read the Law First?

  1. What I want to know is, did Rep. Flynn come up through the Texas public education system? Maybe he is like the horse that could be led to water but could not be made to drink?

  2. Flynn was probably home schooled. He finds things in the consitituion that he supports, and ignores what he doesn’t like. He probably want for Texas to secede also from the U.S..

  3. Maybe he wants to become the head of the Conservative Constitution Project* 😉

    *same as the Conservative Bible Project just applied to other text: kick out the parts you don’t like as ‘later corruptions of the original’ and reword the rest, so the original intent is coming out clearer.

  4. It seems that in the race to the bottom of the heap we allow these so-called represenatives, otherwise known public employees, to waste valuable resources and time on so-called culture issues. Why aren’t they actually working to create jobs without selling-out the middle class they always bragg about…….