Oh, Just Look At This Oklahoma Bible Banger Banging On Like He Knows History And The Constitution
Spoiler! He doesn't! He gets to decide what Oklahoma kids learn anyway.
For some reason, some unbelievably cruel person with a bad sense of humor decided to go and make Ryan Walters the Oklahoma Schools Superintendent. Earlier this week, Walters’s dastardly plan to use taxpayer money to fund a Catholic charter school fell through when the Oklahoma state supreme court decided that it just might violate that whole Establishment Clause thing.
Well! He’s about to show them!
In response to the ruling, Walters announced that, starting immediately, there must be a Bible in every classroom and every teacher must teach children the Bible, pretending that his reasoning was that “it’s an important historical document.”
"The Bible is a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system*. It is one of the most foundational documents used for the Constitution,” he said, without naming even one single solitary example of this. Though, of course, they never do.
*Were the 10 Commandments “the basis of our legal system”? Well, is it currently illegal to covet an ass?
He also noted that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. frequently mentioned the Bible, which may have had something to do with the fact that he was a Christian Reverend.
Children of other faiths will not have the option of opting out of this teaching, because that would obviously make it more difficult to convert them. Perhaps he lives by Tinkerbell rules and can’t enjoy his religion unless everyone else believes and claps for him to show it — which is pretty difficult these days given that the numbers of non-religious people are increasing in this country and nearly 40 percent of Americans are religiously unaffiliated.
He must figure you’ve gotta get them when they’re young, because it’s a lot easier to sell people turning into pillars of salt to elementary school children than to adults who might have questions about that kind of thing.
There is, actually, nothing wrong with studying the Bible in school — so long as it’s part of a course on religions in general, or a Bible as literature class, and not about proselytizing, or demanding that any particular text be taught in all schools, regardless of the teacher’s curriculum, which is what Walters wants.
The fact is, he and others are doing these things because they think if they push this idea that the whole country was founded on the Bible — again, wasn’t! — and if they can indoctrinate kids at a young age, they’ll get to control the culture and they’ll get to control society and then they’ll get their way with everything. Women will go back to the kitchen, LGBTQ+ people will go back to the closet, people of color will pretend they don’t notice racism, white Christian guys will be in charge of everything again and no one will ever again laugh at him for taking a picture of Tintin to his hair stylist.
PREVIOUSLY:
My public school had a History of the Bible class that my atheist butt signed up for in order to see if it was problematic or not. Blame my being on the high school newspaper. Anyway, it ended up being really fascinating and not a problem at all.
It took sections of the Bible and first looked at what was represented in the text and then analyzed what is known about the same time frame geopolitically. It was messy, it created a whole lot of debate, and would probably never be allowed in a class room now because it was an entirely agnostic approach. It didn't state that the contents of the Bible were factual, but rather as more of an analysis of the world at the time.
I really loved that class.
Not going back in any closet for anyone. It took way to long to get here in the first place.