| We Virginians have reluctantly accepted the fact that Mr. Jefferson, a slave owner like most of the Founding Fathers, had children by Sally Hemmings, a slave who also was half-sister to Jefferson's late wife. But..we stand our ground when mere Texans dare to speak ill of one of the three things Mr. Jefferson had placed on his tombstone: passage of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, which codified the separation of church and state.
You know, I could attack one of their icons, if I weren't such a Virginia lady. Oh, I think I will, anyway...
Davy Crockett, who is enthroned in their pantheon of "saints" because of the Battle of the Alamo, they say, died bravely there, cut down in battle by the evil Santa Ana. Recent historical scholarship - gasp, that godless profession those Texans want to emasculate - suggests, instead, he may have been captured and later executed.
Seriously, though, what is going on in Texas in the selection of content for the state's history texts is an extension of the determined ignorance behind so much of far-right ideology. Somehow, those people sacrificed their common sense on the altar of willful ignorance.
To them, global warming is not true because we just had a cold winter.
According to those wingnuts, officials in Hawaii, plus his family and the personnel in the hospital where he was born, all lied because President Obama was really "born in Kenya." How do they know? Some "birther" lady with a mail-order law degree said so, as did Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.
The health care bill poised to pass Congress is, according to them, a "take-over" of health care by the government because Fox News says so. The fact that Congress hasn't even put a public option in the bill to compete with private insurance companies - and already insures more than half the population through Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, and the VA - is meaningless to them.
Even worse than the Texans is one of our own, but please believe me when I say I sure didn't vote for him:
Mr. Jefferson must be rolling over in his Monticello grave about the antics of our new attorney general - Ken "Kookie" Cuccinelli - who seemed to give credence to the "birther" nonsense recently, right before he renewed his "threat" to sue the government over health care reform, and right after his letter to state colleges and universities inviting them to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
That's just what Virginia doesn't need when our supposedly "jobs" governor says he wants to lure business to the state - a far-rightie attorney general making the state into a laughingstock that almost matches those idiots in Texas.
Almost...but not quite yet. |
