Jim Hightower is a gadfly who keeps stinging the Texas GOP in the backside. He was elected State Agriculture Commissioner from 1983-1991. I recently subscribed to his blog to get a deeper insight into the clowns who now control my native state. You might consider doing the same.
He writes here about the latest embarrassment to the state by its leading yahoos.
Cartoon via FFRF.org
Once again, the Texas Legislature leads by example! Erroneous and wrongheaded example, but, Bless Their Little Hearts, they’re just not real good at thinking complicated things through.
The present lawmaking adventure of the GOP-controlled Lege is an attempt to impose a militant brand of Christian Nationalism as the official public religion of Texas. Throughout history, such right-wing attempts to subvert a pluralistic society’s sense of the Common Good with the narrowest mindset of one particular pietistic group has led to both great harm and unintended hilarity. Indeed, the Lone Star State has a long and daffy history of getting the Bible jumbled up in public policy. In the 1920s, for example, Governor Miriam A “Ma” Ferguson rejected a proposal for bilingual education in our schools: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ,” she explained, “it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”
Likewise, today’s trio of Republican numbskulls running our state government – the governor, lt. guv, and attorney general – are acting as Bible-thumping Pentecostals. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick recently rose up on his hind legs to proclaim that ours is “a Christian nation,” that “there is no separation of church and state,” and that God Almighty himself “wrote the Constitution.” To enshrine this religious absolutism into law, these sanctimonious Texas politicos are now enacting a dictate that all public schools must conspicuously display The Ten Commandments “in every classroom,” and the nitpicking autocrats even specify that the displays “must be at least 16-by-20 inches.” It’s rule by rulers.
TIDBIT: The sanctity of the Ten Commandments derives from its devotees contention that the instructions were literally handed down by God. So, every word is sacrosanct. Except “ass.” The 10thCommandment directs: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house… wife… manservant… maidservant… ox… ass….” But the sponsor of the Texas bill, a self-righteous pissant of a senator named Phil King, took the ungodly liberty of removing ass from the holy version of the Lord’s Word. Thus, the children will be instructed by law to obey a religious code co-authored by Yahweh and Phil King. And, thanks to Phil’s red-ink editing pen, they will be morally free to covet their neighbor’s ass.
As proof that these Christian edicts are the holy foundation of US law, pushers of the public indoctrination of children point out that a frieze along the east Wall of the US Supreme Court is emblazoned with the numbers I through X. This shows, they assert, that our nation’s laws are derived from the higher authority of Christian commandments.
But – Holy Ma Ferguson! – they’re flaunting their ignorance. Those numbers refer not to the Bible, but to the Constitution, specifically the 10 Amendments that itemized our people’s original Bill of Rights. And remember that the very first one of those secular amendments prohibits government from enacting any law for the “establishment of religion.”
Note, too, that none of America’s founding documents (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Federalist Papers) even mentions the Christian commandments. Finally, the various writers of the Bible itself don’t agree on the proper wording of the so-called commandments, how many there are, and what they mean.
DO SOMETHING!
To get the lowdown on the Ten Commandments (or is it 13? Or more?) The Freedom From Religion Foundation providesfactual insights and historical context for each one. FFRF is the leading source for tracking theocratic assaults on religious freedom and for providing how-to action items for battling right-wing efforts to turn our local, state, and national government into autocratic theocracies. Connect at ffrf.org.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Lt. Governor Dan Patrick recently rose up on his hind legs to proclaim that …”
A hit! Aye a palpable hit!
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“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ,” she explained, “it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”
Texas must hold first place for voting in the dumbest, most ignorant governors in the country. Is this proof that too many Texans that vote Republican do not read or fact check anything.
Jesus Christ was dead for about 1,500 years by the time modern English came into being around the time of Shakespeare, and JC wasn’t a Christian, or a Caucasian, and he never spoke a European language, let alone whatever they were speaking in England more than 2,000 years ago. I doubt that he knew Latin, too.
England wasn’t even the UK then. The JC we see on the cross in Christian churches and most if not all Christian dominated countries is not anywhere close to what the real JC looked like.
“Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.”
Maybe Texas should post this warning in every classroom and church: “Texas is a fundamentilst evangelicat state where only dumb ASSES get elected governor. If you can read and think for yourself, do not run for governor.”
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This story is a reboot of Alabama’s equally confused decision to put a granite monument of The Ten Commandments in the courthouse in Montgomery. The irony is that is accused pedophile, Roy Moore, was behind this monument to Christianity. In a later court case that the ACLU won, monument had to be removed. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/alabamas-chief-judge-ordered-remove-ten-commandments-monument-courthouse
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“For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. ‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!” —Kurt Vonnegut
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Always loved Jim Hightower. Glad to see he’s still at it.
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The Old Testament is not a book.
It’s a library of books compiled over a period of 1,500 years and then translated and retold in various combinations and forms for another two thousand years.
Among lots of crazy things, it presents the legal code of a half-savage, nomadic, pastoralist people undergoing the transition to agriculture. It holds up as the model of social and political governance the absolute and never-to-be-questioned authority of an all-powerful father figure and contains literally hundreds of stories about the dire consequences of not obeying the absolute authority of the big boss man.
It was among the ancient Hebrews (with the exception of the brief Egyptian flirtation with Aten-only worship) that monotheism developed, and it was INTENSELY PATRIARCHAL AND AUTHORITARIAN. The first cities of the middle east were all built around a central temple/administrative/granary complex with an artificial, manmade mountain with an ORACULAR function of absolute command and control.
There are two version of the 10 commandments, these differ in detail, and there are more than 10 of them. LOL. One appears in the book of Exodus, the other in Deuteronomy. Some scholars place the original material that went into these versions at between the 16th and 13th centuries BCE, though Exodus and Deuteronomy probably took their current form sometime around 600 BCE. So, this stuff is almost as old as the first commitment of the Homeric poems to writing. We are talking about really ancient, superstitious, barbaric stuff here from an ancient system of myth and superstition that embraces an utterly autocratic theory of governance that is completely antithetical to democracy.
That ancient collection of books known now as the Old Testament holds up as the model of social and political governance the absolute authority of a) an all-powerful father figure in the sky who sometimes appears to humans and b) of judges and prophets and later kings and prophests who are the representatives of that autocratic father figure here on earth, as well as c) the corresponding absolute authority of the father in the family. The Danish philosopher Soren Søren Kierkegaard was spot on when he identified as the KEY MYTH of the Old Testament the story Abraham and Isaac, with its sick message of the necessity of ABSOLUTE OBEDIENCE to authority, no matter what the big guy above you asks of you (see Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling for his presentation of this sickening POV). And the foundational creation myth of that library of books, like the 10 Commandments told in more than one conflicting version, that of Adam and Eve in the Garden, is about this theme as well–the dire consequences of disobeying the absolute authority. Adam and Eve eat a fruit they weren’t supposed to. So, everyone, for all time thereafter, is condemned to hard labor and to death. Capital punish is obviously what’s called for if you eat a fruit you aren’t supposed to, right?
After this story, which appears early in the book of Genesis, we get tale after tale after tale of failing to obey and the consequences of that. The OT writers NEVER TIRED of that theme. The socio-political belief system presented in the OT is so inclined toward violence in support of absolute authority that whole schools of Christian thought in the 2nd century–those whom we refer to now as Gnostic–held that there were TWO Gods–the evil, violent, authoritarian Rex Mundi of the Old Testament who created this fallen world–and the good guy God of the New Testament, who offered pie in the sky when you die IF you followed certain secret rituals, the knowledge of which was called Gnosis. (BTW, there is a lot of New Age claptrap on the web and in print these days that totally distorts what the ancient, supersitious Gnostic cults were almost all about. They basically completely eschewed this world as corrupt and evil and blamed women for the evils of the world because of Eve and taught that the only way to save oneself was to learn and practice elaborate ritual magic to purify one’s self by washing away the world. Knowing the right ritual magic was the Gnosis. See Hans Jonas’s great scholarly book The Gnostic Religions for more info. It contains accounts and translations from the key texts of the major ancient Gnostic sects.)
So, here’s the deal. Old Testament values and democracy are COMPLETELY ANTITHETICAL. This is a case of absolute authority vested in a single ruler who issues absolutist laws for behavior, with violation of any of hundreds of these punishable by death, versus democracy and pluralism. You know, an absolute ruler, a boss of bosses, kinda like what certain current presidential candidates think they ought to be.
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cx: There are two version of the Ten Commandments, these differ in detail, and there are more than ten commandments in each.
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Cliff Notes: It’s a malleable, human, fallible document with some eternal stories. You can justify or condemn anything with some random citation.
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We have for millennia lived under the real threat of a return to absolutist patriarchal rule.
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See also:
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Bob: I find the idea of 1-20 breeding ratio a fascinating thing. Not so sure about the implications of it. Have to consider your analysis and comparison to modern gangstaism.
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cx: capital punishment
Sorry about the many typos in that note, folks. Oh for an edit function in WordPress!
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Bob: are you saying Gnosticism is philosophical ptomaine? I say we need more silent consonants in written language. Words jLike pmonotheism and Mdualism.
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LOL. Funny, Roy.
But back to my point: The anachronism of some interpretations of this ancient stuff–like the ridiculous New Agey ideas about Gnosticism–really annoys me. No, Mayans didn’t secretly invent digital computers and spaceships. No, Stonehenge is not an intergalactic portal built by Druids in contact with aliens. No, the Gnostics were not what you would get if somehow you cloned together Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra and Rhonda Byrne. That’s purest anachronism, as if people made a film set in ancient Rome in which everyone was drinking Starbucks and checking their digital watches. This stuff has to be understood in terms of the concepts and mores available to people of the time.
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Off thread, but related: Kathryn Joce writes in Salon about the “American Birthright” social studies standards being pushed by conservatives in places like Florida and Texas:
Martell said he was particularly concerned about “a clear undertone” in American Birthright suggesting “that the U.S. is a Christian nation founded on Christian values and beliefs,” exemplified by passages calling for curricula to emphasize “the role of faith in sustaining and extending liberty” and describing America’s founding principles as “rooted in Christian thought.”
*Likewise, Martell pointed to the standards’ ubiquitous emphasis on Western civilization, evident in the document’s statement that “America’s ideas of freedom” come from “the long history of Western civilization” but also in the way both U.S. and European history, which are covered in depth, are contrasted with “world history.” *
While “American Birthright” presents Western civilization as a rich intellectual legacy that includes the creation of science and democracy, the non-European world is largely covered as the study of “migrations, clashes, massacres [and] conquests” undertaken by “small-scale tribes, nomadic societies, and villages that preceded civilization, whose warlike nature must be understood in order to comprehend the character and the magnitude of the civilizing process.”
“To me, that is like trying to embed white supremacy in the standards without saying, ‘This is the white supremacy curriculum,'” said Martell. “It sends a message that Western society is civilization, and the rest of the world is not.”
https://www.salon.com/2022/07/08/rights-new-social-studies-plan-vows-to-fight-crt-wokeness-and-the-overthrow-of-america/
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“American Birthright” presents Western civilization as a rich intellectual legacy that includes the creation of science and democracy,”
For many right Christians neither science nor democracy is currently their strength. Many of the Christian Nationalist types are anti-vaxxer proponents, and some still cling to the idea that climate change is a hoax. Lots of these right wing folks are leaning toward fascism or at least autocracy like Ron Disaster.
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Somewhere in my journey I remember reading this, “…you are all hanging by a thread over the fires of hell and if you DO NOT OBEY, the thread can be snipped and YOU will fall into the eternal fires of hell.” Damn! I don’t want to be damned, so I will do what you say. Uh, crowd control? Brings to mind “The Village” with adult leaders bent on keeping the children in their village from discovering the truth. Could be just me. Happy Memorial Weekend.
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I went through the public school system in Texas (aside from a couple side trips to a parochial school and a military school in New Mexico) back in the 50s and 60s when a half-year of Texas History and a half-year of Texas Government were required by the State and we got a fairly good grounding in both subjects — if a bit deadly dull in the second case.
The Texas State Historical Association maintain a fairly good Handbook of Texas I often find useful in setting Texans and others straight about the facts of thrilling and not-so-thrilling yester-years.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/anglo-american-colonization
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❝Beginning in 1824 when the Mexican Republic adopted its constitution, each immigrant took an oath of loyalty to the new nation and professed to be a Christian. Because the Catholic Church was the established religion, the oath implied that all would become Catholic, although the national and state colonization laws were silent on the matter. Religion was not a critical issue, however, because the church waited until 1831 to send a resident priest, Michael Muldoon, into the Anglo-Texan communities. This was inconvenient for those wishing to marry because there was no provision for civil ceremonies, and only priests had authority to perform nuptial rites. Anglo-Texans unwilling or unable to seek a priest in Catholic communities received permission from the authorities to sign a marriage bond, a practice common in the non-Anglican foothills of Virginia and the Carolinas before 1776, promising to formalize their union when a priest arrived.❞
Texas history is chock full of ironies.
For one thing it’s clear what the immigrant-fearing Texians fear most of all is the Golden Rule, that immigrants might do unto them what their Immigrant Forefathers did unto others.
For another thing the Constitution of the Republic of Texas included a very strong separation of church and state clause on account of the early settlers chafing at even the mildest imposition of Catholic sacraments on them.
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The first “Acts of Toleration” in the Colony of Maryland provided tolerance to Catholics in that colony. Being in a religious minority usually stimulates the desire to be tolerant, unless, of course, your power exists out of proportion to your numbers.
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It’s astonishing to me that millions and millions of Americans don’t know that monotheism was A RELATIVELY LATE HUMAN INVENTION. Instruction in history, in our schools, is pretty bad, but instruction in prehistory, in our K-12 schools, is almost nonexistent.
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If millions and millions of Americans knew, instead, that modern humans, much like us, existed for five hundred thousand to three hundred thousand years BEFORE one and then another small tribe of them invented the idea of monotheism, of a single god, then that would be a sign that we had started the climb out of the sort of superstition that has its grips on so much of the United States–Texas, Florida, West Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, and other backward, benighted places.
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As the Republican bigots, populated the South, the rest of us, can only, “emigrate” into the north, where, there’s, a little less, discrimination, less, stereotypes, more, openness, for all who aren’t, “alike”, who aren’t, of the, “right” color, religions, or, sexual, orientation.
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Count ’em and let me know how many there are https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020&version=NIV
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