Children are being taught to like Islam and hate Christianity, according to elected officials in Texas, who say they’re hellbent on stopping it. And what these 14 people decide could influence textbooks for the entire nation.

Members of the state’s Board of Education will vote on a new resolution on Friday that argues textbooks dedicate more time to teaching the Muslim faith, while offering less information about Christian history. The information is also skewed, the resolution states, showing Islam in a positive light while demonizing Christianity.

“There’s a problem and this resolution brings attention to it,” Republican board member Don McLeroy told Fox News on Wednesday. “Academia wants to lean over backwards to be politically correct and not be labeled ethnocentric, so it’s kind of a cultural relativism.”

The resolution, proposed by Odessa, Tex., school board member Randy Rives, who tried and failed to get elected to the state board earlier this year, calls Christianity “one of the world’s great religions,” and requires the State Board of Education to reject social studies textbooks which “offend Texas law with respect to treatment of the world’s major religious groups by significant inequalities of coverage space-wise and/or by demonizing or lionizing one or more of them over others.”

The decision by the Texas State Board of Education could influence the rest of the country, since it is one of the largest buyers of textbooks in the nation. This means publishers generally skew their books to fall in line with the demands of the Lone Star State, thus shaping the language in textbooks for millions of students across the United States.

New York Daily News, 23 September 2010

See also CBS News, 23 September 2010