Recapture Texas' future from zealots, know-nothings
Mel Gabler and Peggy Venable are two names that should, by all rights, remain obscure. Given their battle to further the cause of ignorance, xenophobia, and intolerance, it is our sad duty to give their their 15 minutes. After all, roaches scurry when you turn on the lights. These folks are no different.
The Gablers are candid: "We are a conservative Christian organization that reviews public school textbooks submitted for adoption in Texas." Translated into plain language: They censor textbooks for material offensive to conservative Christians, regardless of its accuracy.
The Gablers, who have no scientific or academic qualifications, set out pages and pages of "criteria" for the teaching of history, constitutional law and science, criteria that would get them laughed out of a meeting of real historians, lawyers or scientists. They share the common antipathy of the far right toward evolutionary biology, whose scientific validity is nowhere in doubt outside the coterie of religious extremists. Their conception of constitutional history emphasizes the understanding of state and federal power circa 1800, ignoring the complete transformation of our constitutional structure in the wake of the Civil War, a fact familiar to every first-year law student. And despite their enthusiasm for free markets, their understanding of economics is simplistic. "Private ownership fostered development and conservation of natural resources," they intone, although every undergraduate economics major has studied the "tragedy of the commons," the inability of regimes of private ownership to provide for the protection of common resources. (That's why we have national parks, after all!) "Market competition best limited discrimination and expanded minority opportunity," the Gablers report, not mentioning that it was government intervention, not markets, that created opportunities when the minorities were African- or Mexican-American....
Peggy Venable is the Texas director of the right-wing Citizens for a Sound Economy, or CSE, which endorses the Gabler criteria in its own efforts to censor textbooks. This self-appointed monitor of what the CSE Web site calls "accuracy in academia in Texas schools" follows the Gablers in thinking that global warming is a "controversial" issue. Indeed, she declared in March 2000 that, "The Kyoto Protocol [on global warming] will cost American consumers and taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars for the sake of something that the world's best scientists can't agree is a problem."
Yet well before Venable spoke, 1,000 scientists working under the auspices of the United Nations and the World Meteorological Association had already issued a report confirming that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing global warming. Since then, a committee appointed by the National Academy of Sciences -- made up of the nation's most distinguished scientists, including multiple Nobel laureates -- released a report that reached the same conclusion.
Despite the fact that Venable's understanding of global warming was medieval, she and her allies succeeded in having science textbooks rewritten to downplay the seriousness of the problem.
This is frightening enough, but what is even more frightening is the solution proposed by Brian Leiter, the author of this article. His argument for local control of the textbook approval process could well create more problems than it would solve
There is an obvious solution: Just as then-Gov. George W. Bush championed local control for school districts, we must have local control over textbooks. The influence of the well-funded extremists is exaggerated because they have only one target: the Texas State Board of Education, which approves textbooks for the entire state. But if they have to go community to community pressing their censorship campaign, they are doomed to the defeat they so richly deserve.
He may well be correct in his assertion, but my fear is that the forces of fear and ignorance are just as strong in the provinces as they are statewide. Not only that, but there is a much smaller constituency in the hinterlands. Sure, it will take an organized effort to go from school district to school district in an attempt to ban school books that zealots deem "unfit". I think it is entirely possible that there is enough latent zealotry in rural areas to do the job all by itself. Besides, do we really want to fight brush fires all over the state?
Personally, when it comes to fighting zealotry and ignorance, I would much rather fight a war than a series of skirmishes statewide. When the biggest light is shone on those who would turn Texas classrooms into something resembling the set of "Pleasantville", people will see them for the zealots they are.
