What in the world is he talking about?

The issue involves Terry’s desire to air very graphic anti-abortion commercials during the Super Bowl. Terry, who has described himself as a “lifelong Republican,” says election law requires broadcasters to air his ads because he is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination this year. The Democratic National Committee argues that Terry’s presidential “campaign” is just a stunt to get his ads aired, and broadcasters are refusing the ads. (And we can understand why they wouldn’t want to broadcast images of aborted fetuses to millions of viewers and their children watching a football game.)

So now Terry is suggesting that the refusal of the Democratic Party (he calls it the “Democrat Party”) to accept as true the fiction that he is a Democrat means the party also wants to disenfranchise anti-abortion Catholics. And he likens that to the refusal to allow African Americans in Texas to vote in Democratic primaries during segregation. We wonder if even a very conservative court will buy all that. Regardless, Terry is doing what we’ve seen the religious right do for a long time now: he’s using faith as a political weapon to divide Americans, and he’s doing so in the most inflammatory and offensive way he can.

To refresh your memory, MediaMatters explains just how extreme Terry is: He justified the murder of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller in 2009 by claiming that the physician “reaped what he sowed.” He has warned that Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will burn in hell. He said refusing to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 “is to bow in abject obedience to the Angel of Death.” He burned in effigy a Republican senator who voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. He warned of “violence” if Congress passed health care reform two years ago. And he led a protest outside the White House to destroy a copy of the Koran.

“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach.”

— Alabama Republican state Sen. Shadrack McGill, offering a novel argument against raising teacher salaries. But McGill, who was speaking at a prayer breakfast, defended a 62 percent pay hike Alabama legislators approved for themselves in 2007.

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The decision to adopt new science and social studies textbooks comes after the board adopted controversial curriculum standards for both in recent years — science in 2009 and social studies in 2010. Independent reports over the past year have given both sets of standards poor marks.

Yesterday, for example, a report from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute criticized the 2009 science standards in Texas as “riddled with errors,” “sketchy,” “redundant,” and “woefully imbalanced.” Last year a Fordham report called the American history standards adopted in 2010 a “politicized distortion” of American history filled with “misrepresentations at every turn.” And last fall a report for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s Social Studies Faculty Collaborative warned that the social studies standards are “ineffective,” “fail to meet the state’s college readiness standards,” and “ignore the principles of sound pedagogy.”

Even so, the board will now ask publishers to submit new textbooks based on those deeply flawed standards. All of this comes after the board last summer adopted online instructional materials for some science courses. Working with our friends at the National Center for Science Education, Texas Citizens for Science and other organizations, we succeeded in keeping off of that adoption list any materials promoting creationism/”intelligent design” and related anti-science arguments.

However, the coming adoption of science and social studies textbooks highlights the importance of State Board of Education elections this year. In fact, all 15 of the state board’s seats are up for grabs in 2012. That means the primary elections this spring and the general election in November will determine whether the board’s far-right creationist bloc controls decisions about which science and social studies textbooks students will use for nearly a decade. (Check out TFN’s SBOE Election Watch page here.)

Based on the state board’s decisions last week, this how the schedule for adopting textbooks and other instructional materials looks going forward (estimated costs for purchasing new materials in parentheses):

• 2013: Science, Grades K-12; Math, K-8; Technology applications ($625.65 million)
• 2014: Social studies, K-12; Math, 9-12; Fine Arts ($683.18 million)
• 2015: Languages other than English ($78.82 million)
• 2016: Career and technical education ($103.67 million)
• 2017: English Language Arts and Reading, K-5, Prekindergarten Systems ($536.46 million)
• 2018: English Language Arts and Reading, 6-12; Health; Physical Education ($663.14 million)

The state board is likely to revise and adopt curriculum standards (on which textbooks and other instructional materials must be based) according to the following schedule:

• 2012: Math curriculum standards adoption
• 2013: Fine arts curriculum standards adoption
• 2014: Languages other than English curriculum standards adoption
• 2015: Career technology education curriculum standards adoption
• 2016: English Language Arts and Reading curriculum standards adoption
• 2017: Science and health/physical education curriculum standards adoptions (Health standards include guidelines on sex education.)
• 2018: Social studies curriculum standards adoption

So next year the Texas Freedom Network will once again be mobilizing supporters of science education to stop creationists on the state board from dumbing down instruction on evolution in new textbooks and other materials. And you can be sure that we will be leading the fight for sound textbooks and curriculum standards each year afterward.

“As a science teacher, I am pleased that our standards received a score of 5 out of 7 for content and rigor. We look forward to continuing to work with Texas teachers to bring the best instruction to the classroom with our excellent science standards.”

Seriously? She celebrates a “C” grade? She really thinks Texas is giving kids the “best instruction” with “excellent science standards” that, in fact, get low marks from a conservative education think-tank? News flash for Ms. Cargill: Most parents don’t think mediocrity is something to celebrate, especially when it comes to the education of their children.

From the Fordham report’s section on Texas:

“Texas has produced a set of science standards with areas of strength—including a particularly well-done sequence for earth and space science—but also with weaknesses that cannot be overlooked. These include a tendency across nearly all disciplines to pay lip service to critical content with vague statements, and, somewhat less often, the presence of material that’s well below grade level.”

While giving the standards decent marks in some areas, Fordham describes other sections with words like “sketchy,” “redundant,” “riddled with errors,” and “woefully imbalanced.” Would you describe such standards as “excellent”? We doubt it, but an ideologue like Cargill does.

Don McLeroy, a former board member who served as chairman during the science curriculum standards adoption, was pleased with Fordham’s remarks about how evolution is covered in the standards. Says McLeroy:

“The report confirms what I have always insisted: that the creationists inserted real scientific rigor into the teaching of evolution.”

Good grief. Fordham actually said “evolution is all but ignored” in standards for primary grades, and discussions on the topic in middle school grades are inaccurate. The report points to one particular misleading section about the evolution of finches:

“Creationists often distort these important findings to argue that Darwinian macroevolution does not occur—instead, microevolution does. In addition, the word ‘evolution’ is never used in any of the middle school standards, and the term “natural selection” is never explained.”

Fordham does give the high school bi0logy of evolution good marks, noting that “there are no concessions to ‘controversies’ or ‘alternative theories.’” But that’s actually despite the efforts of Cargill and McLeroy, who wanted the standards to include phony “weaknesses” of evolution promoted by creationists. Fortunately, TFN and other supporters of science education kept that nonsense out of the standards.

And then this from Fordham:

“(T)he high school biology course is exemplary in its choice and presentation of topics, including its thorough consideration of biological evolution. Even so, the term ‘natural selection’ appears just three times, as does the word ‘evolution’ and its variants. It is hard to see how Texas students will be able to handle this course, given the insufficient foundations offered prior to high school.”

It’s no surprise Fordham found that “natural selection” gets short shrift in the standards — it was one of the core concepts that McLeroy and other creationists on the board specifically tried to weaken in 2009.

Public education is clearly under siege in Texas. The Legislature is cutting billions of dollars in funding for public schools. Thousands of teachers are losing their jobs. And members of the State Board of Education are celebrating mediocrity (or worse) in the curriculum standards they’re adopting.

It’s hard to imagine that voters need more evidence that this year — with all 15 state board seats up for election — will be critical to the future of public education in Texas. Check out TFN’s SBOE Election Watch page here.

Sponsored by the Austin-based organization New Revolution Now, the event will feature speakers from Liberty Institute (the Focus on the Family affiliate in Texas), the anti-government (and Koch brothers-funded) Americans for Prosperity, and True the Vote, a spin-off of the vote-suppression/Tea Party organization King Street Patriots in Houston. You might recall that last fall King Street Patriots hosted a speech by a right-wing writer who has argued that registering poor people to vote is un-American and like “like handing out burglary tools to criminals.”

New Revolution Now has also waded into the textbook wars in Texas. In 2010 the group helped pressure (successfully) the Texas State Board of Education to politicize social studies curriculum standards for public schools. The conservative Fordham Institute subsequently criticized the “ideological manipulation,” historical revisionism and contempt for expertise apparent throughout the standards.

We figure this weekend’s event will draw plenty of folks who lie awake at night worried about the global warming conspiracy undermining America, the United Nations taking over America and radical Muslims destroying America. It’s even hard to tell if comments like this one from a reader of CTxPAC’s blog are meant to be taken seriously:

“We are in grave danger, as the Muslims are the chosen to allow the killing of their enemies, which are the same enemies of those who propagate this plan. The enemy is us, the Christians, and the Jews. The Muslims will be just one of their population reduction machines. They now have the ability to manipulate our weather, which strongly suggests that they can reap environmental havoc on anyone they so choose, to cause starvation, floods, and other deadly weather phenomina [sic].”

Yikes.

Far-right Texas state Rep. David Simpson, on airport security pat-downs by Transportation Security Administration agents.

I think it’s unnatural. I think it’s wrong that people touch other people’s private parts outside of special covenantal relationships.

Read the full article

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Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, in a radio ad criticizing Austin video game studio Bioware. Bioware’s new game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, will allow characters to have same-sex relationships.

In a galaxy not so far far away, Star Wars gamers have already gone to the dark side.

Read the full article

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Pulitzer Prize winner Leonard Pitts, at a presentation sponsored by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund last Wednesday.

This argument cannot be about whether or not faith has a place in the public square. It does. No, the argument is about what that looks like, whether fait is expressed in ways that lift and liberate, or whether it is instead used as a cudgel to beat down the disfavored, a fence with which to bar the despised.

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Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie calling Newt Gingrich an “embarrassment.”

You know, sometimes, if your candidate loses in just one step along this path, as was the case when Romney lost to Newt the other night — and, of course, Romney is Chris Christie’s guy — well, you kind of get your panties in a wad, and you may say things that you regret later. And I think that that’s what Chris Christie did.

Read the full article

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Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts, on the intersection of religion and American politics.

I’m a little bit frustrated with the role religion plays in our politics. We talk a good game, but … the proof is in our actions.

Read the full article

“I think it’s unnatural. I think it’s wrong that people touch other people’s private parts outside of special covenantal relationships.”

— Texas state Rep. David Simpson, R-Longview, talking about airport security pat-downs by Transportation Security Administration agents.

Stay informed with TFN News Clips, a daily digest of news on issues involving religious freedom, civil liberties and public education. Subscribe here.

The late comedian George Carlin used to say America was built on a double standard: “This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.”

We wonder how his joke would have sat with members of Tennessee’s tea party, which just presented state legislators with five priorities for action, including amending state laws governing school curriculums to change textbook selection so that “no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported.

Hal Rounds, an attorney and a spokesman for the group, said the goal is to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another,” according to the Commercial Appeal.

“Made up”? Does he think some of the founders didn’t have slaves? That Indians didn’t lose their lands? It’s important that students learn the facts about American history, including the virtues and, when relevant, some of the failings of our founders. Public schools shouldn’t whitewash and revise history to meet the demands of political ideologues.

Read the whole thing here.

Earlier Wednesday Pitts will also be on a panel discussion for “Religion in the 2012 Elections,” a symposium co-sponsored by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the Rice University Religion and Public Life Program. But no seats are left for that event, and registration for the symposium is now closed.

But tickets are still available for the Pitts presentation at 7 p.m. on Wednesday. Click here for more information and to purchase tickets.

Her replacement is Cathie Adams, who had served as TEF’s president until she became chair of the Texas Republican Party in fall 2009. But Adams wasn’t too popular among Republican activists — she lost her post as state party chair in 2010.

Adams is one of the most extreme voices on the far right in Texas today. How extreme? Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

- Adams sees religious diversity as a threat to this country. From an October 1999 TEF letter:

“(W)e must place our faith in the ONE true God, then humble ourselves, pray and seek Him and repent for our sins. Then God will forgive us and heal our land. Do you think that a jealous God will tolerate ‘religious pluralism’ and allow us to come to Him any way we please? Absolutely not!”

- Adams believes that the United Nations is paving the way for the “anti-Christ.”

From a 2000 TEF letter:

“The Bible tells us that in the end times there will be a world government headed by a world leader, called the anti-Christ, who will profess a world religion, but did you ever think you would live in the day when these things would come into being? That is exactly what the United Nations is doing behind the backs of most Americans.”

From a January 1999 TEF newsletter:

“In the future, the anti-Christ will use the pleas for human rights, economic equity and a promise to ‘end all wars’ to found global government. . . . God is not the author of global government, the anti-Christ is, and the UN conspicuously manifests his warmongering spirit.”

- Adams has compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler, suggesting that a speech to American students was “eerily like Hitler’s youth movement.”

- In an e-mail to far-right activists in 2008, Adams viciously attacked the faith of then-candidate Obama (page 40):

“While many question Barak [sic] Hussein Obama’s ‘religion’…, the more important question is whether he has a ‘relationship’ with Jesus Christ because that is the only HOPE that any of us have to obtain eternal life. I personally see NO evidence that Obama has that kind of ‘saving faith.’”

- Adams is an anti-science zealot.

Criticizing evolution in an October 2003 email to TEF activists during the Texas State Board of Education’s debate over proposed new science textbooks:

“Did you evolve from an ape or were you created by God? This is NOT a rhetorical question. Your child or grandchild WILL be taught according to what you choose now.”

Criticizing vaccination programs in a 2003 email to TEF activists:

“State vaccine tracking registries being promoted in the name of protecting the public health are simply a smokescreen for the creation of yet another big brother government-operated system that will further invade our privacy and take away endangered liberties.”

Promoting climate change denialism in a January 1999 TEF newsletter:

“Tell your children they are ‘gifts’ from God,’ not ‘curses to the earth’ because they breathe out CO2, which radical environmentalists claim causes global warming.”

- Adams is an anti-gay fanatic who supports discrimination based on sexual orientation:

Criticizing then-President Bush for hiring gay people in an April 2003 email to TEF activists:

“While our President enjoys high polling numbers because of his leadership in the war against terror, we cannot look the other way when he elevates homosexuals and homosexual sympathizers to key positions within the White House and within the GOP.”

Opposing proposed legislation against job discrimination based on sexual orientation in a February 2003 email to TEF activists:

“Texas’ laws should be aligned with nature and nature’s God, thus protecting children from the unnatural and unhealthy lifestyles of homosexuality and bisexuality.”

Criticizing articles about same-sex couples in the mainstream media in a March 2003 email to TEF activists:

“This display of immoral pictures and articles presents a clear and present danger to traditional families as the media’s odd tolerance is doing its best to mainstream sexual perversion.”

- Defending the dominance of failed abstinence-only programs in Texas schools, Adams blamed the state’s sky-high rates of teen births and sexually transmitted diseases on the supposedly inferior morals of Mexican immigrants:

“If mom had a baby at age 15, are her morals going to be setting different standards than someone who has grown up in the American culture where that is not typical? As a matter of fact, we would look at someone impregnating a 15-year-old as child abuse.”

- Adams opposes the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which gives children of the working poor access to health care:

“Now illegal aliens will be able to purchase cheap insurance for their children. This is an incentive for them to come here.”

- Adams attacked legislation by fellow Republicans (and signed into law by Gov. Perry) to aid the study of how mental health services might be used in treating patients with other health conditions. Such a thing, she said,

“is now more dangerous than ever with the federal government taking up nationalized/rationed health care. Texans must not surrender our mental and physical health to a socialist State that President Obama is striving toward.”

- In 1994 Adams launched this vicious attack on Texas Gov. Ann Richards:

“She’s an anti-religious bigot. . . .  How can people think she is Texas — down-home Ma Richards? I feel very insulted that she is representing me as a Texas woman. Most Texas women are ladylike and God-fearing. Ann Richards has none of those qualities.”

All that, and now she’s back!