Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Spinning history...

Goodness, where do I even start here:

McLeroy would have high school history classes drop the study of a landmark 1949 federal court ruling that declared schools could not legally segregate Mexican American students, even though the practice remained popular in Texas for decades. He wants to replace that with discussion of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that governments may seize property for private development projects and another case in which white firefighters claimed they were passed over for promotion in favor of less qualified colleagues who were black.
If you're going to talk about one case, why not talk about all of them? It seems to me that all three of the cases mentioned here are more than worthy of being studied in any American history class, especially if said history class is going to be neutral as Rod Paige says it should. I may be nitpicking here, but I think to leave Kelo v. New London out of the history books in favor of, say, Mendez vs. Westminster is arguably as bad as or worse than doing the opposite. I don't mean to minimize discrimination against blacks, Hispanics or anyone else, but Kelo v. New London was an undermining of one of the most fundamental rights of humans. (After all, if the government can take your property and give it to another party because that other party's use of it supposedly benefits the public more than yours, do you really have any rights at all? Where exactly does that line of thinking end?) And even though Kelo was passed by the liberal bloc on the Court, it received bipartisan condemnation both formally and informally. Yet they would leave it out?