It’s been amply established that when the religious right claims that it only wants a place at the table for social conservatives, it’s blatantly lying. We got more proof of this from none other than the Virginia state co-chairwoman of the Ted Cruz campaign. She was recently caught on tape calling for a religious right takeover of the public schools.
Cruz is making a serious effort to establish himself as the candidate of choice for the GOP’s social conservative wing. In September, he tapped David Barton, the religious right’s favorite pseudo-historian, to helm his main super PAC, Keep the Promise. And in November, he named veteran religious right activist and former Texas Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar as his state co-chairwoman.
In November, Dunbar was one of the speakers at Barton’s Pro-Family Legislative Network Conference in Dallas, a yearly gathering of Christianist state legislators. As she saw it, the public schools are a key part of what she calls “the seed policy”–derived from the passage in Genesis 1 in which God vows to turn Eve against the serpent who tricked her into eating the apple. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
Dunbar claimed that every social issue is directly affected by this “seed policy.” How’s that?
“(I)f you think about it, every major social issue you’re encountering as legislators actually directs back to what it talks about it in Genesis, ‘if I would put enmity between you and the seed of the woman.’ Because what happens, what is abortion? Abortion is the destruction of the seed. What is homosexuality? It is the prevention of the seed. And what is education? It is potential deception of the seed.”
On the surface, this is nothing more than boilerplate religious right agitprop against those Godless public schools. But then Dunbar takes it up a notch.
“And so when we have 88 to 90 percent, which is approximately the number of the students that are being educated within our socialized education system, effectively indoctrinating our children with our own tax dollars, guess what? We lose every other issue. We lose life, we lose marriage, we lose all of it. So I think this is the linchpin issue.”
Dunbar was speaking in code–one that most of those in the room readily recognized. The only way to stop the public schools from “deceiving the seed” is to take them over. Barton apparently loved this so much that he told his sidekick, Rick Green, to air it on the December 28 edition of “Wallbuilders Live!”
Even by religious right standards, Dunbar is a piece of work. In her book, “One Nation Under God,” she claimed that the framers wanted “an emphatically Christian government,” and never wanted public schools in this country. As she saw it, public schools were “tyrannical” by definition, and amounted to “a subtly deceptive tool of perversion.” At one board meeting, she claimed that it was obvious that the framers wanted “a Christian land guided by Christian principles.” After briefly teaching at Liberty University’s School of Law, she now works for Global Educational Ventures, a group affiliated with Liberty that develops curricula for U. S. history classes.
During her single term on the Texas Board, Dunbar tried to rewrite the social studies curriculum in a way that would have cut out nearly every mention of Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment, suggested that Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for suspected Communists may have been justified, and suggested the Civil Rights Movement planted “unrealistic expectations” for minorities, among other things. At a 2011 prayer rally, she called for God to “invade our schools.” She also believes that no law is valid if it runs counter to “what God has said in his Holy Scripture.” Yep, looks like she learned her lessons well at Regent.
Cruz’ other Virginia campaign co-chair, state senator Dick Black, has been deservedly slammed for suggesting that there is no such thing as marital rape. So Cruz’ Virginia campaign is led by a full-on Christianist and a guy who thinks a husband can’t rape his wife. Says a lot about Cruz, doesn’t it?
