The Texas State Board of Education will consider a resolution next week that calls for rejecting sections of textbooks that "offend Texas law with respect to treatment of the world's major religious groups by significant inequalities of coverage ... or by demonizing or lionizing one or more of them over others." The resolution asserts that current textbooks celebrate Islam with "superlatives" while denegrating Christianity with "pejoratives.""If Christians and Judaism get pushed aside, parents and people don't like it because it's not accurate. It's not true," said Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, one of the board members supporting the resolution.
Critics of the resolution say that the claims of imbalance are exaggerated or not valid. They also pointed out the lack of objections seven years ago when the social studies books were last updated.
Lawrence Allen Jr., D-Houston, the board's only Muslim member, suggested that approval of the resolution would only bring more unwelcome attention to Texas. He wants the board to put an end to the resolution before it comes up next Friday.
"We will become very, very divisive in a vote like that," he said. "It will make national and international news. It's just not good. The board will have to be very, very careful in recognizing that we are throwing gasoline on the fire."
Former Ector Independent School District board president Randy Rives is for the resolution. "You need to make a bold statement to the publishers that pushing this agenda will not be tolerated in Texas," he told the board in July.