And Bigfoot is Santa Claus
by digby
Here’s the latest dispatch from retrograde America, via Alternet:
This 2012-2013 school year, thanks to a bill pushed through by governor Bobby Jindal, thousands of students in Louisiana will receive state voucher money, transferred from public school funding, to attend private religious schools, some of which teach from a Christian curriculum that suggests the Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution and states that the alleged creature, which has never been demonstrated to even exist, has been tracked by submarine and is probably a plesiosaur. The curriculum also claims that a Japanese fishing boat caught a dinosaur.
On the list of schools approved to receive funding through the new voucher funding, that critics warn could eventually cut public school funding in half, are schools that teach from the Christian fundamentalist A Beka Book, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education curriculum.
The rundown of everything that’s wrong with these textbooks is chilling. This is just a sample of what they’re teaching:
– Only ten percent of Africans can read or write, because Christian mission schools have been shut down by communists.
– “the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross… In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”
– “God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ.”
– It “cannot be shown scientifically that that man-made pollutants will one day drastically reduce the depth of the atmosphere’s ozone layer.”
– “God has provided certain ‘checks and balances’ in creation to prevent many of the global upsets that have been predicted by environmentalists.”
– the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists, including John Steinbeck, to advance a socialist agenda.
– “Unions have always been plagued by socialists and anarchists who use laborers to destroy the free-enterprise system that hardworking Americans have created.”
– Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential win was due to an imaginary economic crisis created by the media.
– “The greatest struggle of all time, the Battle of Armageddon, will occur in the Middle East when Christ returns to set up his kingdom on earth.”
I joke all the time saying that it offends my religious beliefs to spend money on this, that or the other, mocking the right wingers’ religious liberty strategy. But this really is beyond the pale. I guess the parents who don’t want their kids taught this drivel can always send their kids to public school, but they’ll probably end up having to be in classes with 50 kids because the funding’s been slashed. Either way, an awful lot of kids will be filled full of fairy tales and right wing propaganda. I guess they’ll be taught to read at least, so that’s something …