Gail Spurlock "Restores" History

The Texas primary election is coming up May 29. The big races are for US Congress and the Texas legislature, but don't forget about those down-ballot races like the State Board of Education (SBOE). These are the people who decide that Texas schoolchildren should be taught to doubt Darwin, to deny there is a Constitutional separation of church and state, and to believe that 1950s McCarthyism had it right after all.

Richardson's own Gail Spurlock seeks to carry the torch for the Republicans. After the jump, Spurlock in her own words.

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Gail Spurlock is running for the Republican nomination for District 12 of the State Board of Education. Here is Spurlock "restoring" the history of the Pilgrims:

Those of us who dug into it, I was horrified at the false information that I had and the missing information from my own education. I didn't know, for instance, that when the Pilgrims set up their little community -- first of all, they were required to be communist. That was in their charter. Communism is that old. It was mandatory. And as a result of that half the people died in the first year. They opened up the Bible, and said "Oh, if you don't work, you don't eat." They turned it into a free market system and they took off and flourished from there.

Source: Texas Freedom Network.

Spurlock has some equally novel ideas for how to revise restore other parts of the school curriculum. Here is Spurlock on sex education:

Society has been reproducing for thousands and thousands of years. I don't think it's something you need to teach children in schools. Even if we never say a word, they're gonna figure it out. It's not that tough.

Source: Texas Freedom Network.

And I thought sex education wasn't about teaching students how to have sex, but about teaching them the risks involved and how to help protect themselves from those risks. Recent news that Texas has the third-highest rate of teen pregnancy in the nation confirms that Texas teens know the former (how to have sex) but not the latter (how to protect themselves).

In 2010, I supported Tincy Miller over George Clayton in the GOP primary (Clayton won). This year, I'm inclined to support Clayton over Miller. But I'd take either of them in a heartbeat over ideologues like Gail Spurlock.