SB 167 in the Indiana Legislature received national attention when its chief sponsor, Republican Scott Baldwin, proclaimed that teachers must not take sides when discussing Nazism, fascism, or Marxism. He later apologized for the statement but not until after he became a subject of ridicule on national news. Now it is dead, although a similar bill is moving in the House.
The Indiana bill that sparked national outrage will not move forward, Senate leadership confirmed on Friday.
“Members of the Senate continued to work on Senate Bill 167, but have determined there is no path forward for it and it will not be considered,” Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray, R-Martinsville, said in a statement.
Less clear is the fate of a similar bill moving through the Indiana House. That bill was passed out of committee, 8-5, and heads to the full House floor next. Should it pass the House, it will be sent to the Senate.
A spokesperson for Bray said Senate Republicans would review the bill, if it passes out of the House.
More on bill:Indiana Senate bill that spurred Nazism remarks stalls; similar proposal advances
Senate Bill 167 was originally scheduled for a vote in the Senate’s education committee Wednesday but was pulled from the calendar, IndyStar previously reported, signaling it faced a rocky path forward. Earlier in the week, Bray said it was so lawmakers could address concerns raised during public testimony on the bill the previous week.
An exchange during that testimony between the bill’s author, Sen. Scott Baldwin, R-Noblesville, and a history teacher from Fishers set off a viral firestorm after Baldwin said it would require teachers to remain impartial, even when discussing concepts such as Marxism, Nazism and fascism.
“Of course, we’re neutral on political issues of the day,” teacher Matt Bockenfeld said at the committee hearing Jan. 5. “We don’t stand up and say who we voted for or anything like that. But we’re not neutral on Nazism. We take a stand in the classroom against it, and it matters that we do.”
Baldwin responded that may be going too far and that teachers need to be impartial and stick to the facts. He later walked back the comments in a statement to IndyStar and condemned those ideologies.Your stories live here…
More:Find out what’s in controversial 2022 education bills, read full text
A similar bill has continued to move through the House. House Bill 1134 contains the same ban on “divisive concepts,” but was amended this week to clarify that teachers may condemn Nazism and other concepts that run counter to the U.S. Constitution.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a process issue, nothing else to read into it. If and when the House passes its version, the Senate will just take it up and fit in parts of the bill they withdrew and then get them in conference. Not from Indiana, but that’s what my understanding of the legislative process tells me.
Do you suppose the teacher could condemn racism? I am pretty sure discrimination based on race is unconstitutional.
Tell that the to Podunk, Trumpy, white supremacist judge in the Podunk, Trumpy, white supremacist town hearing a lawsuit against some teacher brought by a Trumpy white supremacist parent.
Coming to your public schools in 2025: The New National 1776 Curriculum. Part One: Bringing Jesus to the Savages.
Your 2nd paragraph is correct. History repeats, simultaneous with media’s exposure of the horrors of the Kamloops residential schools for the First Nation people and of worldwide priest pedophilia.
A history of the formal structures taken by Christianity could be almost entirely written as one of failed attempts to explain away the absurdities, historical and scientific inaccuracies, moral abominations, and contradictions of its various “infallible” scriptures.
I can see the history tests now:
Multiple Choice. Did Abraham Lincoln debate Frederick Douglass before or after the Continental Army captured the British airports?
A. Before
B. After
C. Whatever The Party and Glorious Leader say
D. B and C
footnotes to answer
Abraham Lincoln held a series of public debates with Frederick Douglass according to a bill introduced by Republican Delegate William Wren in the 2022 Spring session of the Virginia House of Delegates.
The Continental Army “stormed the ramparts” and “captured the British airports” according to First Glorious Leader Donald J. Trump in his 4th of July speech, 2019.
Whatever The Party and Glorious Leader say is always true; anything else is fake news.
AP Classes, 2025-26
Short answer. How do we know that there is no such thing as Global Warming, which was made up by Socialists so that the American economy would continue to fall behind that of China, creators of the Kung Flu?
Correct Response: A) Because Glorious Leader Who Shone More Orange Than Did the Sun (First Glorious Leader, or FGL) said so.; B) because, according to FGL, “it’s just weather”; and C) because FGL’s “instincts [were] better than science.”
I guess “On Fire” wont be in the Library
Anything by Naomi Klein will have been removed from school libraries and set On Fire.
“Teachers must not take sides when discussing Nazism, fascism, or Marxism.”
Presumably, that was in support of all the fascist Nazi Marxists that Scott Baldwin didn’t want teachers badmouthing.
Wouldn’t want to alienate the considerable Nazi voting block in Indiana
Many of whom are Nazis and don’t even know it
History should be taught with impartiality. There is enough hate mongering as it is.
It’s impossible to teach history with impartiality. . . . It’s a study of subjectivities over time.
Also a study of subjects over time.
And of kings.
His Majestory
Of subjects and of kings
And other lordly things
The history is writ
By royalty, to wit
Prince Andrew and his mother the Queen are rewriting History at this very moment (or at least desperately trying)
Trump gave another of his vague, blithering, stupid speeches in Arizona today, kicking off his campaign to win the midterms and then, again, the Presidency. If you didn’t hear this speech, you didn’t miss anything. Delivered to his usual audience of whooping, howling gullibles, Don the Con’s speech was the same pastiche of blithering idiocy and vague jingoism, served up in toddler English and bristling with superlatives about himself, that we’ve all heard from him ad nauseam. Pull the cord on the Trump doll, and out it flows–look at the fake news media back there, they won’t tell you the truth, the Socialists stole the election, we’re going to take back our country, and we have to, or you won’t have a country left, and [long list here] they’re going to pay when we do–blah, blah, blah, blah.
In this utterly predictable rant, so predictable that a Mr. Potatohead Doll could deliver it, he laid out what passes for a Vision of the Future among the leaders of the now fascist Republican Party. But here’s the rub:
If Trump and his ilk–McCarthy, Gaetz, Greene, Abbot, DeSantis, Cawthorne, Hawley, et al.–seize control of the U.S. government via the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election, they will have a far, far more difficult time making over the country to suit their oxymoronic (emphasis on the moronic) blind vision than they can possibly imagine. They have no clue, none whatsoever, how far behind most people in the country they are, how fitted their views are to being foisted onto a people of a previous century, not upon those of our own time. Even if they find themselves controlling it all, millions and millions and millions of Americans simply aren’t going to goosestep to their tune. I suspect that after much turbulence, they will find actually governing according to their regressive, idiotic strongman notions impossible. If they knew any history, they would have some idea what they are setting themselves up for. Hey Repugnicans, about your Vision of the Future: there is a Russian proverb that is much to the point:
Вилами на воде писано (vilami na vode pisano).
“The future is written with a pitchfork on water.”
Let’s hope we can get our act together and figure out how to keep them from gaining power to begin with.
So with you there, Speduktr!!!
Amen to this, speduktr!!!
The Final Legislative Solution
Treat the Nazis kindly
Treat them like your friend
Till the problem’s finally
Solved and at an end
The theme song of the Biden administration? Does Merrick Garland have the DOJ sing it each morning during exercises?
Oh, I see. We are going to wait until AFTER the complete takeover of the government by the Trumpy fascist incarnation of the Repugnican Party to say, “Gee. Maybe we should have put the money-laundering, tax-dodging serial rapist and treasonous insurrectionist in prison.”