Texas textbooks...Again...

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

Is there anyone from Texas in this forum? What are your thoughts on this? I asked a very good friend who lives in Plano what it was like to live in the state that was fast becoming the most reviled/ridiculed in the nation and he said he felt he was adrift in a sea of stupid. Is there anything any of us can do outside of TX? (Because those textbook influence the rest of the country's book choices)

I'm not from Texas, but I'm very familiar with what has been going on in regards to the textbooks down there. This was never a matter of what treatment Islam has had or evolution, or intelligent design, or anything of those stripes.
The Texas school board of education is overrun by Christians. They don't like other religions, they don't like any science that repudiates thier christian beliefs, and they certainly don't believe that non-christian beliefs should ever be in a public school textbook.
These are the same people who honestly believe that America was founded as a Christian nation and that the founding fathers were Christian. Everything they say and do in regards to the government and/or religion is fueled from those beliefs and I think we can all agree that they're dead wrong.

Without any training as a federal lawyer, I can't say with any accuracy what can or cannot be done. My best guess is that, because this affects public schools, that the federal government could intervene on constitutional grounds. I'm even more certain that the ACLU could get involved as this is a clear church-state issue. I'm sure there are also many other institutions who could have legal recourse.
To be fair, however, even if done for all the wrong reasons, the actual changes may be far more reasonable than what the board is actually whining about pubically because there are filters between what they say they want and what they can actually do - even in Texas. So, it could be the case that the end result may be perfectly constitutional.

The only reason I imagine that this hasn't already been done is because Texas hasn't actually gotten anything they want so far in these regards for one reason or another but there's no reason nothing could be done once the Texas School Board gets to a certain point.