Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes culled from news reports from across Texas, and beyond.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, responding to President Obama’s proposed gun legislation by saying that instead of enacting tougher new laws, Americans should simply pray for protections.
As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help. Above all, let us pray for our children.
————————————
Rush Limbaugh, being Rush Limbaugh.
You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.
————————————
Catholic League president Bill Donohue on Friday in a news release, in which he suggested that President Barack Obama should swear in on Das Kapital — Karl Marx’s famous analysis of political economy — rather than the Bible.
The problem for (MSNBC’s Lawrence) O’Donnell is not (Pastor Louie) Giglio, it’s the Bible. He says the practice of presidents putting their hand on the Bible is ‘one of our most absurdist [sic] traditions.’ Furthermore, he says that because Obama embraces the gay agenda, he should not swear on the Bible. The point is not without merit. Given Obama’s ideology, perhaps it would make more sense for him to swear on Das Kapital.
————————————
An excerpt from the White House’s response to petitions from Texas and seven other states calling for the right to secede.
As President Abraham Lincoln explained in his first inaugural address in 1861, ‘in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual.’ In the years that followed, more than 600,000 Americans died in a long and bloody civil war that vindicated the principle that the Constitution establishes a permanent union between the States. And shortly after the Civil War ended, the Supreme Court confirmed that ‘[t]he Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States.’
————————————
Zack Kopplin, who is 19 and a history major at Rice University, discussing his fight to keep religion out of Louisiana’s science classes — including those at private schools receiving government money.
These schools have every right to teach whatever they want — no matter how much I disagree with it — as long as they are fully private. But when they take public money through vouchers, these schools need to be accountable to the public in the same way that public schools are and they must abide by the same rules.
————————————
Southern Methodist University professor Mark Chancey, citing one example of what is being taught at Texas public school courses on the Bible. Chancey authored a new TFN Education Fund report that examines what students are learning in those courses.
We’ve basically updated the Genesis story to the science of the 1850s.
————————————
