The Texas state Senate passed a new bill dropping the requirement for public school teachers to instruct students that the Klu Klux Klan is “morally wrong.”
Senate Bill 3 passed with an 18-4 vote on Friday in the Republican-led Senate and will be considered by the Republican-led House, according to the Hill. The measure also drops several other requirements, including those involving Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Cesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony and the women’s suffragist movement, and Native American history.
The bill looks to prevent teaching requirements that Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in June, as the governor now says the latest bill is an attack on critical race theory. The bill instead includes provisions about teaching “the history and importance of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964,” as well as the “Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.”
It also removed a provision about teaching “about the writings of and about the founding fathers and mothers and other founding persons of the United States,” and instead requires writings about just the “founding fathers.”
“What we’re doing with this bill, we’re saying that specific reading list doesn’t belong in statute,” bill author and Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes told Bloomberg Law.
Democratic State Sen. Judith Zaffirini wondered how “a teacher [could] possibly discuss slavery, the Holocaust, or the mass shootings at the Walmart in El Paso or at the Sutherland Springs church in my district without giving deference to any one perspective?”
