In reference to North Carolina, you can never say “it can’t get worse.” It always can, as long as Pat McCrory is Governor and the Tea Party extremists control the legislature.
Governor McCrory named a new member of the state board of education: J. Todd Chasten. His major qualification appears to be his role in efforts to ban a book from the English honors class in his district.
The North Carolina General Assembly will vote on his nomination tomorrow.
NC Policy Watch reports:
Governor Pat McCrory’s recent nomination of J. Todd Chasteen to serve on the State Board of Education has raised the eyebrows of some western North Carolinians.
A Boone resident who appears to have a thin record of experience with public education, Chasteen was deeply involved last year in efforts to ban a book from a public high school English classroom in Watauga County.
“We should reject Governor McCrory’s recent nomination of Wataugan J. Todd Chasteen to the North Carolina Board of Education,” said Appalachian State University English professor Craig Fischer at a public forum at the university earlier this week, objecting to Chasteen’s lack of experience in public education.
“Chasteen sided with would-be censors during last year’s battle over keeping Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits in the sophomore English Honors curriculum at Watauga High,” Fischer added. “He spoke on behalf of banning the book at a February 10, 2014 school board local forum about the controversy, claiming–inaccurately–that Allende’s book is full of ‘deviancy’ and child pornography.”
Chasteen, an attorney and executive with Boone-based international aid organization Samaritan’s Purse, not only spoke publicly for removing The House of the Spirits from the classroom, but also lobbied the eventual tie-breaking board of education member, Ron Henries, in person and via email in an effort to persuade him to vote for banning the book, according to emails obtained by N.C. Policy Watch.
This is the mission statement of his organization:
Samaritan’s Purse is a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization providing spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. Since 1970, Samaritan’s Purse has helped meet needs of people who are victims of war, poverty, natural disasters, disease, and famine with the purpose of sharing God’s love through His Son, Jesus Christ. The organization serves the church worldwide to promote the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He is obviously a man drawn to charitable, faith-based work. But he has no particular qualification to sit on the state board of education. His activity in the book-banning controversy was sufficient to recommend him to McCrory as right for the state board of education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Far right extremists often scream that they are having their freedom and choice taken from them by the liberals they have spend decades stereotyping and demonizing, but when they get in power, they take away freedom and choice from everyone else but them.
As it turns out, Christianity itself (as officially established by Constantine in 325 A.D.) was built upon mass book banning and burning of “pagan” writings throughout the Roman Empire at that time. Watch this BBC documentary about ‘The Son of God’ in the Myths of Mankind series. https://youtu.be/1t9lafTGNDE?t=2m4s
It tells how Roman Emperor Constantine reshaped what Jesus really taught at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. To reunify a splintering empire with a single story, Constantine combined several religions into one and called it Christianity. His Council of Nicea picked four select stories that portrayed Jesus as the “son of God”, but completely discarded the other 80some gnostic stories about Jesus that told a very different story. He then initiated a book burning campaign to destroy all of the writings of every other pagan religion throughout the empire and killed anyone who protested. He started a purging process that ultimately led to a Christian mob storming the Library of Alexander over 100 years later, where much of its vast knowledge was burned and it’s top scholar, Hypatia, murdered.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/womens-history/hypatia-ancient-alexandrias-great-female-scholar-10942888/?no-ist
According to the gnostic gospel of Thomas, Jesus saw God as the energy that makes up matter (like Einstein’s E in Energy = mass x speed of light2) and therefore all of us are sons of God, or the creator. Jesus was also a socialist, constantly encouraging the rich to give away their wealth and that the “Kingdom of God” could be found among the poor. But Constantine de-emphasised that part of the message by making Jesus into the “Son of God” instead (which was really the God of Horus story from the Mithras religion out of the Egypt, that was much more popular throughout the empire at the time). Just hijack the Horus story by calling him Jesus instead and destroy everything or kill anyone who dares to say something different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pagan_Christ
So it turns out that Christianity has a long history of book banning/burning throughout its 1,700 year history since Constantine created it. What Jesus taught 2,000 years ago is something entirely different than what Constantine twisted Christianity to be.
Thank you for sharing. The Eastern Roman Empire’s anointed, hand picked Christians and revised/edited, and purged Bible text also waged war against other Christ inspired sects that didn’t all into line and swallow the Kool-Aid that Constantine approved.
I wonder if Trump is related to Constantine or is that emperor reborn.
Trump does not seem that sophisticated to me. I would say that the corporation’s attempt to reshape Christianity in the 1950’s compares more along the lines of what Constantine did.
Listen to this Canadian Broadcast Corporation Radio One interview with Kevin Kruse, one of last year’s best selling authors that wrote “One Nation Under God, How Corporate America created Christian America.”
http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2679465875
The Princeton history professor explains how the corporate world started undermining Roosevelt’s New Deal religiously in the 1950s, after they failed to reverse his regulatory state and social programs politically. Corporations sponsored pastors like Billy Graham to preach the individualistic idea that capitalism and Christianity are just alike. That they are testing grounds to determine whether we succeed in business or go to heaven in the afterlife.
And anything that interferes with this Godly testing process, such as a regulatory state that hindered business, or social programs that helped the unfortunate instead of God, is “Pagan Statism.” That the battle against big government (whether it is the battle without against the Soviet Union where the state runs everything) (or the battle within against Roosevelt’s New Deal that hinder profits) was a continuation of the battle Constantinople started against the pagans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_pagans_in_the_late_Roman_Empire
I think the rise of Trump’s mob is more like the “Theodosian decrees” that came 50some years after Constantine. It’s when a Christian mob stormed the Library of Alexandria, destroying all competing pagan or gnostic writings and murdered one of it top scholars, Hypatia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia
It was an attack upon knowledge itself, so that the Roman Theocracy could be ruled by blind faith alone.
Organized religion is a business.
“How rich is the Vatican?”
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/how-rich-vatican-so-wealthy-it-can-stumble-across-millions-euros-just-tucked-away-1478219
Matthew 21:12-13 (New American Standard Bible)
12 And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves.
13 And He said to them, “It is written, ‘MY HOUSE SHALL BE CALLED A HOUSE OF PRAYER’; but you are making it a ROBBERS’ DEN.”
Wow!
Such liars. This is why they don’t want high school students reading about Chile in the 1970s:
“The 1973 Chilean coup d’état was a watershed event in both the history of Chile and the Cold War. Following an extended period of social and political unrest between the right dominated Congress of Chile and the elected socialist President Salvador Allende, as well as economic warfare ordered by US President Richard Nixon,[2] Allende was overthrown by the armed forces and national police.[3][4]
The military deposed Allende’s Popular Unity government and later established a junta that suspended all political activity in Chile and repressed left-wing movements, especially the communist and socialist parties and the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). Allende’s appointed army chief, Augusto Pinochet, rose to supreme power within a year of the coup, formally assuming power in late 1974.[5] The United States government, which had worked to create the conditions for the coup,[6] promptly recognized the junta government and supported it in consolidating power.[7]”
Chiara
We just can’t have students reading about what really happened in places like Chile.
God knows, that might actually lead to trials and (gasp!) accountability for people like Henry Kissinger and we certainly can’t have that.
Kissinger is the biggest war criminal of the second half of last century. (Folks like Pol Pot and Mao don’t count because they killed their own citizens and are therefore just plain mass murderers.)
Samaritan’s Purse is no ordinary evangelical Christian organization. It is headed by Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham the evangelist family with powerful political ties with every single President since Eisenhower.
Listen to this Canadian Broadcast Corporation Radio One interview with Kevin Kruse, last year’s author of “One Nation Under God, How Corporate America created Christian America.” http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2679465875
Listen to the Princeton history professor explain how the corporate world sponsored pastors like Billy Graham to preach the individualistic idea that capitalism and Christianity are just alike. That they are testing grounds to determine whether we succeed or fail while we are alive, or go to heaven or hell in the afterlife. And anything that interferes with this Godly testing process, such as President’s Roosevelt’s New Deal regulations that hindered business or social programs that helped the unfortunate, is “Pagan Statism” or paganism returning in the form of the state. Their biggest fear being that people would ultimately become reliant upon the government, instead of God or the moneyed corporations.
So during the height of the Red Scar of the 1950’s, Billy Graham and President Eisenhower started a nationwide campaign to put “One nation under God” in the pledge and “In God we trust” on the money. All in an effort to equate Roosevelt’s regulations and social programs as the government enemy within, with the Soviet Union where the government took over everything. These phases conclude nearly every Billy Graham quote, and are now printed on a growing number of police cars throughout the country.
Unfortunately, our corporate and religious leaders ultimately want to turn America into a corporatized theocracy. Our founding fathers like Thomas Paine (who coined the phrase “The United States of America” and unified the country for the revolution when he wrote “Common Sense”) and Thomas Jefferson (who said “the end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations”) would not be very pleased.
Dr. Ravitch, I sent this to all of the lawmakers in the NC General Assembly concerning Chasteen and his ties. Some people may not know that his wife ran/runs a Christian school that has received Opportunity Grant funds from the tax payers of North Carolina.
https://caffeinatedrage.com/2016/06/29/censorship-and-the-fear-of-free-thought-the-nomination-of-todd-chasteen-for-sboe/
As a Watauga High School graduate, I am proud that the curriculum at the school includes literature which introduce students to new cultures, like Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Although I am also ecstatic that Watauga High School still has teachers and students who will fight to keep this literature in the classroom, I am dismayed that they have to fight, and I worry that those who have little experience in public education have so much power over it in my hometown, and, now, the entire state.
Like Chiara, I also wonder at Chasteen’s true objection to the literature of a Chilean-American winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (awarded to Allende the same year Chasteen attempted to ban her book from Watauga High School). As a future ESOL teacher, I am largely in favor of including texts which engage all students with multicultural literature in order to raise their own cultural awareness (Ladson-Billings, 2006), as well as texts that raise awareness about relevant issues such as rape and incest rather than silencing them. I applaud the work of the teachers and students who stood up to Chasteen’s attempt to ban this book. It seems that, after the announcement that Chasteen was confirmed by the state legislature, they will have to keep fighting for years to come.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). It’s not the culture of poverty, it’s the poverty of culture: The problem with teacher education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 37(2). 104-109.
I am also a graduate from (and former teacher) of Watauga and am proud of the high school’s reputation throughout the state. Since retiring and migrating to Canada I have learned many things about the US that has been hidden from most of its citizens.
I discovered that our support of Pinochet in Chile is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the USA secretly supporting oppressive dictators throughout Latin America. Since it was established in 1946, the US Army College of the Americas located in Panama trained terrorist to intimidate the social minded from speaking up and allowing corrupt governments under corporate control to rule the continent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation
Here is a great documentary describing the horrors this terrorist training facility has perpetrated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGtegY0S3yo
The US Army College of the America’s has since been relocated to Fort Benning. Georgia. Yearly marches to shut down America’s terrorist training facility keep growing each November and now number about 40,000 protestors. http://www.soaw.org/take-action/november-vigil
You can learn more at the School Of Assassins Watch website. http://www.soaw.org/