McLeroy Has Trouble Explaining
By Dan
Still not sure where the Texas State Board of Education is going with the social studies curriculum standards? Then listening to a radio discussion with board member Don McLeroy from last week might help.
~snip~
McLeroy spoke about the biblical principles he sees at work in America’s founding and focused on the Declaration of Independence. And it was clear that he hasn’t given up his obsession with attacking evolutionary science:
“The way I would look at it is the fact that the principles which our country is founded are easily seen in the Declaration of Independence. In the beginning, second paragraph, it says, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ (that) they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ As you look at those principles that are involved there, they state there is truth, there’s God, and that we’re creatures. Now, they very carefully avoided biblical language. I’m not saying that they were trying to make this a biblical nation or any thing like that, but the principles on which it was founded were biblical. . . . (T)he secularists say there is no truth, there is no God, and that we have just evolved. That’s not what’s in the declaration, in the founding document of our country.”
When McLeroy got around to addressing the nation’s governing framework, the Constitution, he offered a rather odd description of the document’s intellectual origins. He also has a contradictory view of America’s Founders — they wanted a secular nation, but they founded the nation on biblical principles:
“In the Constitution we have a separation of powers. The different branches of government, that came from the Enlightenment philosophers. But where did these guys get the idea? They got the idea from a view of man that is a biblical view of man. So when I talk about it founded on biblical principles, I’m not saying that they were establishing a Christian state. They wanted to establish a secular state. But that secular state is founded off of, uh, biblical principles.”
McLeroy defended dropping Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard requiring students to study the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. Fellow board member Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, offered the motion to delete Jefferson and has suggested that he was not “germane” to the original standard. McLeroy provides a similarly half-baked excuse:
“(T)he standard was talking about other Enlightenment philosophers and people that had a foundation on the revolutions, and so that’s why . Jefferson was like another generation of people writing, so that standard he was taken out of didn’t fit as well because he, you know, came hundreds of years or so later than the other philosophers or more of the people mentioned in that standard. That’s why he got stricken from that.”
Jefferson lived “hundreds of years” after others listed in the original standard? Actually, no. Jefferson lived from 1743 to 1826. Three of the five other men listed in the original standard died during Jefferson’s lifetime, and two died well under a century before Jefferson’s birth: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755), Voltaire (1694-1778) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
~snip~
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
