Last Thursday, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters — he of the classroom Ten Commandments posters and Trump Bibles — sent out a video to every school district in Oklahoma, demanding that it be shown to all students. It was a video of him announcing the Oklahoma Department of Education’s new 1984-ishly titled Department of Religious Freedom and Patriotism, followed by a little over a minute of Walters praying for Donald Trump.
“We are requiring all of Oklahoma schools to play the attached video to all kids that are enrolled,” Walters wrote in a letter to superintendents. “We are also requiring that that school districts send this video to all parents as well.”
Since then, the state’s Attorney General’s Office has said that he actually does not have the authority to do that, and at least seven school districts (out of 509) have refused to show it.
“There is no statutory authority for the state schools superintendent to require all students to watch a specific video. Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents’ rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights,” said Attorney General’s Office spokesperson Phil Bacharach.
On Monday, Walters stopped by CNN to defend his actions to Pamela Brown, who questioned him both on the constitutionality of his demands and on why he is focused on this when Oklahoma’s school system is ranked 48th in the nation (49th, according to US News & World Report).
Brown brought up the fact that 14,000 parents had signed a petition saying they wanted to impeach Walters for forcing religion on their kids and asked him what gave him the authority to do these things, and he responded by accusing her of “pushing a left-wing narrative,” which did not make much sense in the context of the question.
Brown asked him the question again
He said:
The Constitution’s crystal clear on religious liberty. I know the Left doesn’t want our kids to know anything about the role the Bible played in American history. They don’t want any of our kids to know about the Constitution.
Our religious liberties are protected, and the Left has driven the Bible out of schools, driven prayer out of schools and everything in education has gotten worse since before we had a federal Department of Education and we had the Bible and prayer in school.
Guess what? We were leading the free world, this was the greatest country in the world, and we have seen every statistic has gotten worse since the creation of the federal Department of Education and the Supreme Court pulled the Bible and prayer out of schools.
Just so we’re clear, Bibles have always been permitted in schools and teachers have been allowed to teach parts of the Bible, so long as they are relevant to secular lessons. For instance, there are many biblical references in literature, especially in Shakespeare, and it’s certainly relevant for learning parts of history that have to do with religion, like the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition or the way the South used the Bible to justify slavery, but it can’t be taught the way that Walters wants it taught, because of the Constitution. You know, the thing he says we don’t want kids to know about?
The Supreme Court did, however, end school prayer in public schools in 1962, and while he, as a straight white Christian guy, may think things were pretty darn great in 1962, it’s not a stretch to say that things have vastly improved for the rest of us since then.
The Department of Education was established in October of 1979, and I’m not sure what statistics he’s looking at, but in 1980, the high school completion rate was 68.6 percent. For the school year 2020-21, it was 87 percent. That’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty obvious improvement if we’re talking about statistics.
So he can’t name statistics, he just says “all of the statistics.” His evidence that the Bible plays an important part in our American history is relatively limited to historical figures who happened to be religious mentioning the existence of God or Heaven, or the pilgrims coming here for religious reasons — having faced oppression in England by … guess who? Guess!
King James I. You know, the probably gay, witch-hunting King who commissioned the Bible that Walters wants taught in schools? That’s who they were escaping. They were Brownist separatists who thought the Church of England was corrupt and wanted to start their own church, but were barred from doing so, because King James wanted there to be just the one church for everyone.
All of this aside, the reason Walters is doing all of this is not just so students will convert to Christianity or remain Christian (which is increasingly less common these days) but so that, even if they are not Christian, they will accept theocracy as the way of the world. He wants them to see the Bible as part of the fabric of this country, so that when someone like him says “Hey, we need to get rid of same-sex marriage because the Bible says it’s wrong” or change the law to suit the Bible and the Christian religion, when Christian nationalism starts to seep in, they will think that it is normal, regardless of what their personal religious beliefs are.
CORRECTION: This post originally included a statistic on literacy that was for the world instead of the US. It has been removed!
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Stop violating his religious freedom by not believing what he believes. That's just rude of you.
Every time he opens his mouth, an atheist gets their wings.