Textbooks pushing falsehoods help the Republican right build an image of the US and its constitution

[applegrove]

Textbooks pushing falsehoods help the Republican right build an image of the US and its constitution in its own likeness

Republican religious fundamentalists would rewrite American history

by Stephen Bates at the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/aug/30/america-religious-fundamentalists-rewrite-history

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Under a voucher system introduced by the state's governor Bobby Jindal – a rising star of the Republican party – pupils attending 119 schools in the state, many of them run by the religious right, will be reading textbooks which tell them that dinosaurs co-existed with humans, slaves did not have it so bad and the Ku Klux Klan had some good points. Oh, and that Mark Twain was hopeless and Emily Dickinson, who spent much of her life shut up in her house in Amherst writing poetry, was presumptuous and disrespectful – both of them because they apparently had doubts about the beneficence of the Almighty.

These are from textbooks issued over the past few years by Bob Jones University in South Carolina, a bastion of segregationism and racial discrimination for decades, until it found it might lose its charitable status. It is more than a slight irony that this has come from a governor with an ethnic Indian background, who was a Rhodes scholar not so long ago at New College, Oxford, academic home of Richard Dawkins – the prof's head must be spinning that an alumnus is sanctioning science teaching that the Earth is only 6,000 years old in schools educating some of the most disadvantaged children in the US.

Walking with dinosaurs is bad enough, but what is particularly egregious is the shameless rewriting of history that is going on in some parts of the religious right. The Tea Partiers with their tricorn hats and fifes and drums propel a mythic past of the sort many nations comfort themselves with, but the Bob Jones textbooks with their assertions that "the majority of slave holders treated their slaves well" and the KKK "tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality" are not only absurdly, demonstrably wrong-headed, but take distortion to an entirely new level. Such tropes are fading even in the South, but it is not so many years ago that an elderly white woman in Natchez, Mississippi gravely informed me that of course, in the olden days, they treated slaves well "because, after all, they were our property".

More insidious still because of their veneer of scholarship is the work of the conservative historian David Barton, who tries to wrestle the nation's history into a Christian template that it just does not fit. His latest effort, Jefferson Lies, which attempts in the face of copious evidence to the contrary, to tug the Founding Father into the evangelical Christian tradition, was last month withdrawn from publication after being described as the least credible history book in print.

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