Local school boards: No on Morasch

Charley Morasch is a wingnut. Here are some answers to questions from the Kansas City Star:

What would you like to accomplish if elected/re-elected to the school board?

• Provide a stimulus to improve social studies curriculum to include the words and ideas of the founding fathers, and the legal foundations of our nation, which have been censured to reflect politically correct nonsense. I want to see our district face the brutal facts of reality, that censuring history, censuring the words and ideas and even our founding principles is something we will not allow to continue in American public schools.

This is ahistorical tripe. He is repeating Christian Reconstructionist dogma. The Reconstructionist are a movement aimed at, well, reconstructing America into a "Christian nation." As part of that effort, they've roped in dishonest hacks like David Barton to rewrite history, turning deists like Jefferson and Washington into evangelical Christians, and the Constitution into a theological text.

As another shout-out to that crowd, Morasch says that the last book he read was A History of the American People by Paul Johnson. Reviewing that book and Ann Coulter's defense of Nixon in High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, History News Network editor Rick Shenkman writes:

Bad as Coulter's history is, Paul Johnson's is even worse. In his recent best seller, A History of the American People, Johnson recycles the tired, two wrongs make a right claim that Nixon was no more guilty of an impeachable crime than FDR, JFK or LBJ, each of whom also authorized illegal wiretaps and bugs. This is the same argument Nixon apologists made twenty-five years ago; it is no more convincing today than it was then. But by selectively focusing on wiretaps and bugs Johnson is able to avoid the inconvenience of confronting the long list of Nixon's other offenses.

Johnson apparently has never met a felonious Republican he didn't immediately embrace. …

Paul Johnson is now known to be careless with facts. His History of the American People, according to the New York Times, is replete with errors. In an interview for the paper's magazine Johnson acknowledged the errors and said he'd correct them as soon as his critics pointed them out. He left the writer of the piece under the impression that it was the critics' responsibility, not his, to vet the book.

Johnson tries to present the American Revolution as a revolution for religion, contrasted with the atheistic French Revolution. The American Constitution is as atheistic as something can be, though. It never mentions God, indeed the Founders explicitly rejected imprecations to the divine, it grants religious freedom and forbids religious tests for public office. This was not a religious revolt, but an unambiguously secular one – focusing on economics and civil liberties.

Morasch rejects that idea, claiming at the Conservative Union Reform Effort that "The cornerstone genius of our Constitution is the three-way division of governmental power and a ‘checks and balances’ system. The division came straight out of Jewish history and Isaiah 33:22… 'The Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our King.'" Morasch states clearly that his essay was "an appeal for all public and private institutions of learning in this nation, to avail" his bizarre view of history "to our nation’s greatest asset… our children."

The Star asked Morasch point-blank:

Should intelligent design be taught in the public schools? If so, in what context or class?

I am not sure if I would support an I.D. course or not, I might if I saw one that looked good. I haven’t reviewed any yet. I certainly support open discussion in the classroom of the evidence for and against evolution or creation. I do not believe that the problems with macro evolution (ex. lack of transition skeletons and the complexity of DNA which negates Darwin’s spontaneous generation of life) are allowed to be freely discussed in the classroom. This is not our moral or scientific heritage. We should follow the evidence wherever it takes us, and then encourage the open exchange of ideas concerning the evidence. I fear that there is such complete polarization on this issue that both sides have taken a dogmatic defense of their position, so that any objective view of the evidence is not even permitted in the classrooms, often under the threat of a federal judge enforcing what some might see as censorship. Our classrooms and teachers need the freedom to follow the evidence. Currently, they do not have that freedom.

Of course they do. They do not, however, have the freedom to present Morasch's lies, nor to use a science class to discuss "our moral … heritage."

Our moral or scientific heritage would or should include lying to children about fossils or DNA. Transitional fossils do exist, as do explanations for the origins of DNA. We should teach children what we do know, not treat gaps in our knowledge as something children should memorize and treat as permanent features.

Heck, Darwin never really dealt with "the spontaneous generation of life," his work deals with the origin of species, a process which neither he nor modern biologists regard as spontaneous.

Morasch also opposes allowing classes to use books by Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison and other award winning novels which happen to contain sex scenes, saying they never should have been approved for schools, except that "in the spirit of progressive secularism, these books have been selected for their titillation value."