[Buddha-l] No influence in Texas? (comparative religions dept)

[Richard Hayes]

On May 17, 2010, at 8:46 AM, JKirkpatrick wrote:

> Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting
> God and guns US Christian conservatives drop references to slave
> trade and sideline Thomas Jefferson who backed church-state
> separation

I heard about this several weeks ago. Textbooks are being purged of references to Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr and John Kennedy. This makes sense. At least thirty years ago Texas banned all discussion of evolution from biology textbooks, and rightly so. There is no evidence whatsoever of evolution in Texas.

Meanwhile, Arizona has passed a new state law banning ethnic studies programs. School systems in Arizona are no longer allowed to offer courses that teach history from the perspective of African-Americans, chicanos or native Americans or other ethnic groups. I reckon this means that no history can be taught at all, since the standard history books tell the story of America from the perspective of Europeans who had no trouble at all justifying genocidal campaigns against the people who already lived in North and South America. I am sure the new Arizona law will also ban the showing of cowboy movies, since almost all the Hollywood movies about the old west are the products of Eastern European Jewish directors and producers who had wild fantasies about how the west was won. (It has been estimated by some historians that about 50% of the cowboys in the old west were freed slaves, but how many African Americans did you count in the gunfight at the OK corral?) The main source for the plots of old cowboy movies was the book of Joshua. The Indians were the Canaanites and the Philistines stubbornly holding on to the New Israel than God had given to the Americans. Clearly all those movies should be banned in Arizona.

I wonder whether it's still legal to talk about Buddhism in Phoenix or Tucson. Anybody know? 

Richard