The Tea Party war on the 20th century continues in Tennessee, where yesterday a group of teabaggers presented the state legislature a list of demands for the new legislative session. Their aim is "to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”
What “truth” do these conservative activists demand be taught? Apparently it doesn’t involve portrayals of the “minority experience” or anything else that might taint their mythical hagiographies of the Founding Fathers. At a press conference, the activists said they want a focus on the “progress” the Founders and “the majority of citizens” made, to the exclusion of supposedly “made-up criticism” about slavery and the treatment of Native Americans:
The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”
Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.
“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds
It’s unclear what these activists think is “made-up” about the very real history of slavery in America or the very real intrusion on Native American lands by early American settlers.
These are people who live in an alternate American reality, but it's not necessarily just the teabaggers. Alex Seitz-Wald, commenting on this at TP, says "when conservatives speak warmly of American history, they tend to pick and choose only the parts which reflect their contemporary world-view — and they are equally eager to sanitize the parts that do not." Which is precisely what the Republican House leadership chose to do in their reading of the Constitution last week.
No comments:
Post a Comment