Mel and Norma Gabler started attending meetings of the state school board in the 70's, when the board met to consider new textbooks for adoption, showing up with copies of the proposed texts all marked up with errors and left-wing propaganda all highlighted. The Gablers would then read chapter and verse back to the board (which is elective not appointive in Texas) with scathing denunciations of Marxist or atheist language, claims, agitprop, and so on. They'd stir the pot, and the board would, in the glare of publicity, refuse to adopt the NEA's favorite Marxist offerings. Eventually publishers got the word, which stirred the ire of the Left.
Norman Lear was a longtime Hollywood agitator who'd rolled left-wing "lessons" and "teachable moments" into his various programs. With co-producer Bud Yorkin (a Tennessee liberal), he introduced All in the Family and its laughingstock lower-class conservative mouth-breather, "Archie Bunker", portrayed by hardcore liberal actor Carrol O'Connor, and his well-meaning but uneducated wife "Edith" (Jean Stapleton) to the teachable American public in the early 70's. The show was all about "educating" the irascible troglodyte "Archie": the adult children, played by Carl Reiner and Sally Struthers, were Yorkin and Lear's tools, as they constantly Beheld with Horror and Reproved with Middle-Class Arched Eyebrows their mouth-breathing, cliche'-spewing, punching-bag father. The basic plotline was "Father Knows Least" and was stock sitcom gold, following such tour de force daddy-bashing hit series as Make Room for Daddy (Danny Thomas and his brat Marlo the archfeminist), The Life of Riley, and The Honeymooners (Jackie Gleason, Audrey Meadows, Art Carney).
Norm Lear saw what was going on in Texas and shortly launched his People for the American Way to counter Mel and Norma Gabler and enable left-wing, NEA-approved textbook adoptions by the Texas board, who were gumming up the liberal maleducation works. Since then, the voters of Texas have repeatedly put numbers of social conservatives on the board, and RiNO governors, including George W. Bush, have appointed "good-government" RiNO businessmen to the boared whenever a vacancy appeared and run RiNO's against sitting conservative members with large fluxes of political money (violating, of course, the 11th Commandment, which they'd promulgated and frequently upheld as holy text, to dissuade conservatives from doing the same thing to their candidates).
More recently, RiNOs and liberals have combined to try to remove the textbook-approval power from the Texas school board, but I don't know how those initiatives have fared at the constitutional-amendment polls. I offer the background and bare bones so other, more up-to-date Texas FReepers can fill us in, whether these initiatives have succeeded in neutering the Texas school-defense conservatives.
Interesting and educational background post.
Thanks for the ping, and thanks for providing a short background and history lesson for the non-Texans and those unaware of the way we do things here.
From time-to-time, we have to clean house (politically). Looks like it’s about time to do some ‘spring cleaning’, LOL.
I really, really want our current effort at dumping Straus as Speaker of the House to succeed. Gotta get rid of the RINOs and libs in Texas politics.
Like I said - time to clean house.