‘Asexual Stealth Phrases’?
You can’t make up stuff like this.
A State Board of Education member called on textbook publishers to change the wording in health books being considered for use in Texas schools to clearly state that marriage is between a man and a woman.
Republican Terri Leo said certain books attempt to nullify a Texas law banning the recognition of same-sex civil unions by using “asexual stealth phrases” such as “individuals who marry” instead of husbands and wives.
“I want the reader, the child to know that marriage is between a man and a woman,” Leo said in a written statement released during a board meeting Thursday.
The 15-member board is scheduled to vote Friday on whether to approve the books for middle and high schools. The decision could affect dozens of states because books sold in Texas, the nation’s second-largest textbook buyer, often are marketed elsewhere.
Democratic board member Mary Helen Berlanga noted that one textbook showed a picture of a mother and a father and a young girl and her brother.
“We cannot start censoring books because we do not like the terminology,” Berlanga said. “I don’t see two males or two females holding hands.”
I have now heard just about everything. Is it me, or do these people give a whole new meaning to the term “Orwellian”?
Hold on to your sanity, folks. These are the people running things, for the next four years at least.
November 7th, 2004 at 1:31 pm
Was it Texas where the repug won a seat in congress that did not want girls in schools to go to bathrooms alone because of the “lesbian action” or some such idiot phrase, that was going in bathrooms?
November 8th, 2004 at 9:59 am
These people scare George Orwell.
The missing piece of the article is about how school textbooks work. They debut in one of two test markets: California or ***Texas***. So, we can laugh at the idiot Texans, but they are writing the textbooks your son will use one day in school.
I think it was PFAW that did a great expose on this a few years back, and I can’t put my hands on the article now. Keep an eye out for this info.