Kelly of Siam

During my years as a public school teacher I became aware of the power of state textbook committees. Texas and California are the two largest. These committees decide which textbooks may be used in their state. Their power extends well beyond their local school districts and their state as the textbook publishers look at the committees' guidelines and fall in line. This allows their books to be considered in that state...so the decision of the Texas committee may cause HarperCollins to adopt neo-conservative stance to history. Now, this HarperCollins published school text is up for sale in Washington state.

I was fortunate enought to teach in a small school district that allowed me to use any text I saw fit as long as I could justify it. I was able to use Howard Zinn's "A Peoples' History of America" in my senior class Contemporary World Problems.

More about this later. Take a look at this......
Liars for Jesus
Posted by Richard Collins


Image by George Eastman House via Flickr

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1419644386/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

February 18, 2008

Amazon.com reviewer: Steven L. Roberts (Madison, WI)

Liars for Jesus by Chris Rodda is one of the best written and most important books about contemporary American politics that I have read in years. The only problem with this book is that it was apparently published with the author’s own money, making its availability somewhat limited. This book should be widely read and discussed, because it helps explain why the Christian Right seems so incomprehensibly loony to most of us who are not part of that movement, and, conversely, why they attack the rest of us with such unfettered zeal.

There has been a series of revisionist “history” books published since the end of WWII which give a “Christian” version of American history that attempts to paint the Founding Fathers and subsequent American culture in a way that is in agreement with contemporary Fundamentalism. We have now had a couple of generations of conservative Christians who have been buying into this version of history and reacting angrily to an America that assumes fundamental principals like the separation of church and state to be at the core of what America stands for.

Author Rodda systematically lists and then busts a series of myths that these spurious history books have generated. She leaves no stone unturned in doing so.

Things get really scary when she starts quoting Supreme Court opinions written by Rennquist, Thomas and Burger, and it becomes apparent that members of our highest court do not know the difference between real history and Fundamentalist wishful thinking.

The book is a fascinating study in how the desire for a different set of facts can, over time, morph into an alternative if deluded “reality”.

My Comment:

There is an insidious clandestine effort underway driven by Christian fascists to pollute the common person’s understanding of American history and the part religion plays in that history. This is not merely the usual difference of interpretation that ethical historians normally write about. As Michelle Goldman explains in her book, “Kingdom Coming”, what is dangerous is that a gradual shift has occurred so that what would have been unthinkable rubbish ten years ago is now embraced by the fascists as absolute truth.

Others, trained from childhood to follow authority blindly, accept the lies as truth. Since kids in sham homeschools never encounter any other point of view they readily accept the lies. Which is exactly why their misbegotten parents sequester them in their sham schools to begin with.

Accordingly, this propaganda posing as history is being freely passed around over the Internet and incorporated in textbooks sold to the child abusers engaged in lying to their children. Revisionist history books by several different authors (David Barton, Peter Marshall, Mark A. Beliles (Author), and Stephen K. McDowell to name a few) are widely used in sham homeschools along with grossly distorted books on science that are teaching ID and creation myths and calling it science.

Intelligent Design (ID): somewhere, at some point in time, someone did something, somehow, for some reason, that affected the history of life somehow – Michael De Dora Jr, CFI in a Tweet

Parents do this because they trust the likes of James Dobson, Michael Farris, Phylis Schafly, and Pat Robertson and they have no critical faculties. James Dobson, the high priest of religious child abuse, insists the most important quality a child can have is obedience. According to him children are inherently incorrigible and they must be whipped to convince them to obey what they are told to do. These are the methods totalitarians use.

We know from engaging parents on public discussion forums how deranged these people are and how futile it is to try and hold an intelligent discussion with them. A constant retort is, “well that is your opinion”, facts mean absolutely nothing. Their brains are reduced to a worthless pile of rotten cells that serve no function. Thus, we see the result of The Rise of Idiot America.
Related articles by Zemanta
Religious right: ‘a leaderless army’ (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
The Christian Right Campaigns to Soften Its Image (usnews.com)
Common ground (washingtonmonthly.com)