osewalrus (osewalrus) wrote,
osewalrus
osewalrus

Link Harvest: How Christian Were The Founders?

This article from the NYT Sunday magazine perplexes me. I think it meant to be an expose of how religious conservatives are leveraging their position on the Texas Board of Education to exert broad influence on education throughout the U.S. given the extensive use of the TEKS guidelines for other jurisdictions. But I find it poorly written, as if it wants to pretend it isn't an expose with a perspective.

My feelings are further complicated because I find the idea of ignoring the Christian nature of drafters equally difficult. Indeed, my personal feeling is that while we from our vantage of history would view these as a most non-diverse group of European Christian men from the same general socio-economic class, they viewed themselves as wildly diverse, drawing from religions and backgrounds that were often at war or legally suppressed in their native lands. The result was a structure designed to accommodate diversity of views, one which expanded as our notions of diversity expanded to include those things that would have seemed so utterly ridiculous to the founders (such as the equality of people regardless of sex or color) that they saw no reason to mention them.
Subscribe

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    switch
    default userpic

    Your IP address will be recorded 

    Help
  • 1 comment