How do I love thee, Texas? Let me count the ways.
When you're not threatening secession, executing retarded people, corralling dirty Mexicans, or blessing the rest of the nation with gifted political minds like George W. Bush, Phil Gramm, Tom DeLay, and slick Rick Perry, you continue to surprise and thrill us in new and delightful ways.
Like the Lone Star's latest ingenious contribution to society: new, improved standards for its public school history textbooks. Yay!
Yes, the good ol' boys on the Texas State Board of Education, whose previous enlightened positions taught us that slavery was simply an outreach program by rich white planters to help poor Africans come to America to learn better farming methods, have now put their unique Texas twist on other important subjects, like U.S. history, government, social studies, politics, culture, religion and even music. Hooray!
Now every school child from Amarillo to Corpus Christi and Juarez to Galveston will know the truth about the great Lone Star state and mighty red, white, and blue, without the taint, bias and lies from the liberal, Jew-run media elites.
In a 10-5 State BORED of Education decision split along party and ethnic lines, conservatives managed to push through new curriculum standards for every major subject taught in Texas schools, ensuring a nice, fundamentalist undertone to counter the excessive emphasis on minorities, homosexuals and other historically persecuted groups long poisoning Texas textbooks.
Thanks to these new standards, history students must remember the Alamo, except for the eight dumb Mexicans, known as the Tejanos, who died alongside James Bowie and Davy Crockett fighting for Texas' independence.
Not surprisingly, all five minority members opposed the revised standards, citing inadequate coverage of blacks and Hispanics and the promotion of right wing, conservative causes, with one board member, Mavis Knight, D-Dallas, charging some board members–primarily social conservatives–of "manipulating" the process to insert their own political and religious views, "whether or not it was appropriate."
"I cannot go back to my community and say I participated in perpetrating this fraud on the students," Knight said.
"These people fought alongside Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. They were there, yet we have ignored their names for a long time in our textbooks and schools. They deserve their place in history," Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi added.
But, Pat Hardy, R-Fort Worth, disagreed, noting that no Hispanics were considered leaders at the Alamo.
"They were just among the other people who died at the Alamo. It would be awkward to say that teachers and students should identify people who died at the Alamo," she said.
Everyone knows dirty brown people don't count!
As expected, Hardy and other board members' assertion that it was appropriate for students to learn about real (white) Alamo leaders such as Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and William B. Travis, was met with the usual minority whines and cries for attention.
"This is a disservice to the Hispanics who fought alongside the others at the Alamo," Berlanga said. "What did James Bowie and Davy Crockett do that the Tejanos did not do?"
Ummm, how about come out of their mother's wombs the right color?
Board member David Bradley, R-Beaumont, insisted the standards were "very inclusive" of all ethnic groups, including the addition of multiple minority historical figures, but naturally, said the board was not interested in getting into "number counting and quotas."
They don't start teaching fractions until Junior High, silly!
Minority board member, Rick Agosto, D-San Antonio, led the board's losing effort to add hip-hop music to a list of influential American musical and cultural movements, already including rock 'n' roll, Tin Pan Alley, country and the Beat Generation, arguing that "this movement has affected our culture" and needs to be "looked at and analyzed by our students."
He noted that the Beat Generation–included in the standards–was known for sex, drugs and rejection of mainstream values yet weren't deemed "inappropriate" by the rest of the Christian crusaders comprising the school board.
Ha ha, nice try Agosto. But you forgot the most important part, Beatnicks were white!
Don't worry, high school students will still learn all about Newt Gingrich and the rise of conservative groups like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family, without the hideous stain of liberal and/or minority rights groups and such controversial, terrible, "Un-American" leaders as George Washington (gay!), Abraham Lincoln (slave-lover!), and labor leader César Chávez (Mexican!).
Luckily, omitting these lefty losers from the classroom means more room for teaching all about beautiful Christianity's role in America's past, including the "motivational role the Bible and the Christian faith played in the settling of the original colonies." Amen!
But the best part of all is that since Texas is one of the nation's biggest textbook publishers, publishers often tailor their materials to meet Texas' standards, meaning what is taught in the Lone Star State often winds up being the basis for future textbooks and achievement tests in other states too!
So three cheers for Texas, where Jesus is always in style, the BBQ's always cookin', the guns are always smokin', and creepy Christian fundamentalist bible camps are apparently called "schools," but it doesn't matter cause the kids can't read anyway.Ah yes, everything's bigger in Texas, including the chances that little Johnny grows up bigoted, ignorant, uneducated, closed-minded, misguided, afoul of the law, and well on his way to being the next great two-term cowboy President of these United States.
