Jonathan Gurwitz
Thomas Jefferson has taken some tough knocks in recent years. For the better part of two centuries the Sage of Monticello was respected as a Founding Father statesman scientist and leading intellectual force behind the great American experiment.
The author of the Declaration of Independence an advocate for abolition was also a slave owner. Monticello in addition to being a refuge for the Enlightenment was a plantation.
Multiculturalism and critical theory have done much to dent Jeffersons halo. Hollywood brought his long-rumored relationship with slave Sally Hemings to the big screen in 1995 with Jefferson in Paris." And on the basis of DNA testing scientists concluded in 1998 that Jefferson was the likely father of one of Hemings children.
What were left with is a portrait of a man far more complex and interesting than any nickel caricature.
Jefferson embodied our nations highest ideals but was also a conveyor of its original sin from which his own words would provide a measure of absolution some four score and seven years after he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
But what the multiculturalists critical theorists big screen illusionists and scientists did to Jefferson is nothing compared to what a misguided band of putative conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education have done to him. Charged with developing standards for the social studies curriculum that will guide public schools in the Lone Star State for the next decade they have written Jefferson out of history.
The board revised the standard requiring study of the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke Thomas Hobbes Voltaire Charles de Montesquieu Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on political
revolutions from 1750 to the present." In its place the amended standard requires examination of the impact of the writings of John Locke Thomas Hobbes Voltaire Charles de Montesquieu Jean Jacques Rousseau Thomas Aquinas John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone" period.
Not only does the new standard erase Jefferson it also removes from examination the philosophic tradition of which he was a part one that produced a history-altering revolution based on God-given individual rights limited government and the consent of the governed.
Those are subjects real conservatives should want all children to learn and understand today more than ever.
But the conservative charlatans on the State Board of Education blotted out Jefferson because hes a little too secular for their liking. Forget about the Laws of Nature and of Natures God" and individuals being endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."
Jeffersons lapse was in laying the foundation for the wall of separation between church and state.
If you can remove Jefferson from the curriculum for being insufficiently pious why not also remove George Washington for being a poor exemplar of family values? After all the Father of our Country had no children of his own.
If you can eliminate Jefferson on suspicion of secularist tendencies why not also remove Abraham Lincoln for being forced to share beds with men as a
poor prairie lawyer?
This sanctimonious group confirms every liberal conceit about the ideological parochialism of conservatives especially Texas conservatives. In doing so they discredit those of us who make real conservative arguments based on individual rights and limited government during this time of unprecedented expansion of federal power and spending.
What they accomplished isnt conservative. Its not pro-family pro-life pro-freedom or patriotic. Its idiotic.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free" Jefferson wrote it expects what never was and never will be" a lesson the board of educations simple-minded majority could stand to learn.
