Eat it, Jefferson. Eat it hard.

Last week we congratulated Texas for sending Don McElroy, the man who was spearheading Texas' efforts to use school textbooks as a means to rewrite history with a right wing christian conservative bent, packing in a primary contest. But we added in the caveat that the man still had several months left on his term and the board still had a christian conservative bent, so there was still time for them to do some damage. And boy did they ever decide to use the time they had left.

Among the changes made include:

removing a reference to “sex and gender as social constructs” in order to avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else”, refused to require that students learn the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others, added references to "laws of nature and nature's God" in sections about major political ideas, made the second amendment the only relevant idea in the Bill of Rights, considered it important to learn about "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association", students now learn about the "violent philosophy of the Black Panthers" to counterbalance the nonviolence platform of MLK, tries to excuse the inherent racism of Japanese internment, added apologetics for McCarthyism and the McCarthy hearings because I guess that whole period wasn't all bad, made it so that Hispanics don't exist inside of US history, added ominous references to the "unintended consequences" of of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX, removed the word "capitalism" because it has a "negative connotation", and knocked Thomas Jefferson out of the required curriculum and the Enlightenment... mostly because he coined the phrase “separation between church and state”. It also didn't help that he was a paleontologist.

So America is a Christian nation whose founders gave no thought to anything other than Biblical law ruling the land, whites did everything, McCarthyism and internment weren't so bad, and Thomas Jefferson isn't important to US history but Phyllis Schlafly is. Let's let Donny boy explain himself.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Yes, reality does have a well known liberal bias. What's one of the non-crazy board members think?

Mary Helen Berlanga, [stormed] out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

Yes they can.

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

Yeah, but if you rewrite history, then it becomes history! See how it works? Ah well, who needed to learn about Thomas Jefferson anyway? If he was important he would have had a bigger role in HBO's John Adams mini-series.

A round of applause for Texas' contributions to education, culture, and knowledge. It's not enough that our culture, media, entertainment, government, politicians, and news work to dumb this country down, now we have to go into books in an attempt to more proactively dumb our kids down. I'm sure it's all for the best, who learns anything from history anyway?