Burn Baby Burn!

You’ve gotta hand it to Texas State Representative Matt Krause, unsurprisingly a member of the GOP, aka God Opposes Pornography.  He is in the news for emailing a list of 850 books to Texas school superintendents,  asking, “Are these on your shelves?”  That’s an admirably long list and includes such trash as “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron and several titles from Margaret Atwood’s notoriously obscene oeuvre. Check out the whole list.

Decades ago Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography as “I know it when I see it,” inviting the question as to when and how he was seeing it.  But I digress.  Krause must have mighty fine vision to find so much to object to in school libraries.

Of course I’d bet my bottom dollar that Krause has read very few - if any - of the books on his list.   It is like the raging storm over Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools despite that CRT is not in schools.  And I’ve not observed a single Republican blowhard who can give even a rough approximation of a definition of CRT.   I have a fantasy of a  game show where Louie Gohmert,  Paul Gosar, Margory Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are quizzed on CRT or any of the content in any of the books on Matt Krause’s list.  The bonus round could be questions on the United States Constitution.  The sponsor’s prize money would be quite safe.

Krause’s silly bibliography is part of a broader Republican campaign to protect America’s children from education.  If these cockwombles had their way, education would consist of the Pledge of Allegiance, exploring history through looking at both sides of the Holocaust, comparative biology examining the unproven theory of evolution alongside the more plausible Creationism and an elective course titled, “The Earth Sure Doesn’t Look Round To Me.”

Libraries would be stocked with all known editions of the Bible, the collected works of Jared Taylor (look him up) and a compendium of the wit and wisdom of Tucker Carlson.

This national campaign to sanitize education by restoring American Exceptionalism, bringing God back into the classroom, rehabilitating the Confederacy and putting sex back in the closet is not a laughing matter.   It is linked to a less absurd, but much more dangerous, full-scale assault on the wall separating church from state.

As my erudite blogger friend Jan Resseger reports, the Supreme Court heard arguments last week in yet another case, Carson v. Makin, dealing with the constitutionality of a voucher scheme that diverts public dollars to religious education.  In this case, as in many others, the animating force is the inaptly named Institute for Justice, one of many organizations with ideological zeal that don’t wait for petitioners to come to them.  They go out to find them.  

At issue is a challenge to a Maine statute that properly prohibits vouchers being used to attend schools that explicitly teach religion.  The Supreme Court has already ruled in several cases that a state cannot deny funding based on a school’s religious identity, but has heretofore held the line on funding direct religious instruction.  If prior rulings poked a hole in the wall, this one appears ready to blow it up.  The conservative majority appeared sympathetic to the petitioners - perhaps eager to open the floodgates entirely.   

As Resseger reports, “. . . one of the plaintiff families in Carson wants the state to pay for a school that requires teachers to sign a contract stating that ‘the Bible says that God recognizes homosexuals and other deviants as perverted’ and that ‘such deviation from Scriptural standards is grounds for termination.’”  It is breathtakingly ironic that the legal “logic” used to argue for public funding of religious schools is that it’s unfair to discriminate against them.  I’ll leave you a moment to reread the previous two sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

 The campaign to restrict voting rights is getting attention, although too little.  But the legislative and judicial efforts to dumb down and sectarianize education are proceeding apace with little to no media attention.  Taken together,  they are part and parcel of the Republican effort to end our secular democracy and replace it with a kinder and gentler version of the fundamentalist theocracies in places like Afghanistan and Iran.  That ours is Christian is a distinction without much of a difference.  I’ll leave you a moment to reread the previous paragraph . . . . . . . . . . .

Without no embarrassment at the irony I offer the famous words of Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

He was, of course, writing of the Holocaust and I intend no equivalence.   

But now is the time to speak out.