The election of Cynthia Dunbar to the Texas State Board of Education proves that an informed electorate is a myth. In 2006, she was elected by ignorant voters and, unfortunately, the education of Texas school children is being dumbed down as a result.
Lisa Falkenberg, a Houston Chronicle columnist, has exposed Dunbar for what she is - a militant Christian right-wing Republican nutcase. Dunbar based her election campaign on the views she espoused in her book, "One Nation Under God: How the Left is Trying to Erase What Made Us Great."
In her column, "Not a book for the faint of heart" (Houston Chronicle, 12-11-08), Falkenberg refers to several passages from Dunbar's book. Get a load of this stuff:
> Christians should "occupy" all nations. (Editor's Note: Sounds very much like Muhammad's call for the faithful to go forth and conquer the world.)
> Barack Obama's pro-choice stance on abortion is the same sort of "fascist, supremacist attitude exhibited by Mussolini and Hitler."
> Public education is tyrannical, unconstitutional and the Satan following Left's "subtly deceptive tool of perversion."
> Parents who surrender their children to government-run schools are "throwing them into the enemy's flames even as the children of (biblical) Israel threw their children to Moloch."
> The doctrine of separation of church and state is a "fallacious principle" intended to brainwash America's children with a secular, humanist world view.
> Democrats who support their party's platform can't be true, Bible-believing Christians.
> All U.S. pastors have a religious duty to tote the Republican Party line and forgo their tax-exempt status so they can preach it from the pulpit.
> The Founding Fathers created "an emphatically Christian government" and, thus, every person who wants to govern in this country should have "sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God."
> America's declining, immoral society is in need of Christian soldiers who will rise up to save it.
> The similarities between our society and that of "pre-Holocaust" Nazi Germany are "striking."
According to Falkenberg, Dunbar wrote a piece for Christianworldviewnetwork.com in which she said that Obama, the terrorist sympathizer, would bring tyranny to America by declaring martial law after his accomplices attack our soil.
Once they heard them, most Christians would instantly disavow Dunbar's loopy outlandish views. Apparently they were not paying attention to her as she campaigned for office. How could any voters in their right mind support a candidate who openly compares Obama to Hitler? Well, they did. Dunbar got a majority of the votes in each and every one of the 16 counties that comprise her Texas State Board of Education district. And she even carried Travis County, one of the most liberal enclaves in America. As I said, Dunbar proved that an informed electorate is a myth.
If she were the only religious zealot on the state board, her's would be a voice in the wilderness. Unfortunately, there are other far-right Christians on the board. The Texas State Board of Education is responsible for shaping the curriculum for all of the state's 4.5 million public school children. And since the board dictates the content of school textbooks, other states will be subjcected to the whims of its members because individual publishers will not want to print up different versions
of the same textbook.
Dunbar and her allies on the board are committed to discrediting Darwin's Theory of Evolution. They want texbooks to question its validity and they want "creationism" or "intelligent design" included together with the theory of evolution. Nevermind that 98 percent of those in the scientific community accept Darwin's theory as fact and scoff at creationism and intelligent design. If Dunbar and her allies get their way, the science curriculum for Texas and other states will have been dumbed down.
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