In Texas, religious freedom and parental rights are only for Christians
They say everything is bigger in Texas — apparently, including the hypocrisy.
How else do you explain people who say they oppose “indoctrination” in public schools, but want to turn elementary school classrooms into Sunday Schools?
With help from a temporary appointment by Gov. Greg Abbott ®, the state board of education has narrowly approved a controversial new curriculum that targets elementary school students for religious indoctrination. Texas officials may deny that’s what they’re doing, but it’s the reality that Rice University religion scholar David Brockman found when he studied the plan.
For example, the biblical creation story is used in an art lesson for kindergartners, with questions for students not about the art but about the biblical account.
He also found that the teaching plan treats biblical stories about miracles and the Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection as historical facts. A section on the Roman Empire for older students draws heavily on New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus, something unclear in the letter parents would receive about the curriculum.
The curriculum slants history, highlighting Christian opposition to slavery and segregation while ignoring the ways Christianity was used to justify and defend them.
Religious-right activists have been trying to turn public schools into mission fields for a long time.
In 2000, People For the American Way Foundation published an exposé of inappropriate proselytizing and antisemitic course materials in Bible classes being taught in Florida school districts.
This year, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters spent tax dollars to put Trump Bibles into public school classrooms and invited discredited Christian nationalist “historian” David Barton to put his notoriously inaccurate stamp on the state’s social studies curriculum.
America is an increasingly diverse nation. And Texas is one of the most religiously diverse states in the country. It is simply wrong, and a violation of core constitutional principles, for a politically empowered majority to use public schools to indoctrinate students into one particular faith.
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/50...s-schools/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"