Recapture Texas' future from zealots, know-nothings

In 1999, when the Kansas Board of Education, under the control of fundamentalist extremists, removed the teaching of evolution from the science curriculum in public schools, Kansas became the object of national and international ridicule for having caved in to zealots and know-nothings. But the biggest uproar actually came from business leaders, who recognized that the economic viability of the state depended on the availability of credible public education. Businesses don't relocate to or invest in communities where ignoramuses set the educational curriculum.

The Kansas Board reversed itself within a year.

Too bad Texas hasn't learned from the Kansas experience. For the economic future of Texas is now under attack from similar extremists who, once again, are trying to inject politics and sectarian religious views into the selection of textbooks for schools in Texas.

Consider "the Mel Gablers" of Longview, whose Web site (http://members.aol.com/TxtbkRevws/about.htm) provides the primary ammunition for Texas extremists looking to censor school texts. 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.