Are our tax dollars being used to subsidize hate? ” It’s bad enough that books like this exist and that young children are indoctrinated in the inaccurate and often intolerant worldview that they espouse. Expecting the rest of us to pay for it is simply unacceptable.”

More from the AU website:

Textbooks used in religious schools often revise history beyond distortion: “a study by Frances Paterson, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Valdosta State University in Georgia. Paterson examined a series of textbooks produced by three large fundamentalist Christian publishers – A Beka Books, Bob Jones University Press and Accelerated Christian Education. What she found was disturbing.

Paterson reported that the books “frequently resemble partisan, political literature more than they do the traditional textbooks used in public schools.”

Observed Paterson, “[R]eligion…appears in places where its inclusion is unexpected: the failure of the French and Spanish to successfully colonize North America was part of God’s plan that the United States should be established as a ‘Christian’ i.e., Protestant nation; the violence of the French Revolution resulted from an absence of Christian values; the lack of economic progress in Africa and India is a result of pagan belief systems; German Biblical higher criticism and a belief in Darwinian evolution were direct causes of World War II; and so forth.”

In addition, Paterson noted that the books often attack legal abortion, gay people, women’s rights and evolution. (One Bob Jones book asserted, “These [gay] people have no more claim to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”) The books also distorted Supreme Court rulings on church-state separation.”

It gets worse: “…But imagine if you had no choice but to support schools that taught from these books. Imagine if private religious schools were funded with your tax dollars through a system of voucher subsidies.

In some parts of the country, you don’t have to imagine that. It is happening. In her study, Paterson found publicly funded fundamentalist academies in Milwaukee and Cleveland, where vouchers are in place, using these controversial texts in the classrooms.

Vouchers have been proposed in other parts of the country. Congress is debating whether to expand Washington, D.C.’s “experimental” voucher plan, and a Georgia legislator pushed (unsuccessfully this time) to bring a statewide voucher plan to the Peach State.

It’s bad enough that books like this exist and that young children are indoctrinated in the inaccurate and often intolerant worldview that they espouse. Expecting the rest of us to pay for it is simply unacceptable.”

see: http://blog.au.org/2009/03/13/troubling-textbooks-why-vouchers-would-force-you-to-subsidize-hate/