Texas House Bill 3979

At the heart of the democratic enterprise is the notion of tolerance. And this is so for one single reason: because embedded in the concept of majority rule (which is, obviously, the core principle of any democratic state) is the parallel obligation to guarantee that even people who espouse unpopular points of view have an opportunity to speak out on matters that matter to them. It’s hard to imagine anyone seriously taking issue with that: the whole point of enshrining freedom of speech and a free press in the Bill of Rights—and, at that, in the First Amendment—is to guarantee that, for all the majority may rule, the minority may never be silenced. And that certainly applies—perhaps even specifically applies—when the view not being silenced is unpopular or out of favor.

All that being the case, there was—at least at first blush—nothing controversial in Texas House Bill 3979, a new law just recently passed by the State Legislature, requiring teachers in the state’s public schools to be evenhanded when presenting “widely debated and currently controversial” ideas to pupils in the state’s public schools. Why would anyone oppose teachers taking an evenhanded approach when instructing children regarding contentious matters? There are, after all, two sides to every story.

The decision earlier this week to remove the statue of Thomas Jefferson from the New York City Hall Council Chamber is a good example of those two sides: you can damn Jefferson as a slaveowner and a racist rapist (and allow those details to overwhelm the role he played in the founding of the nation) or you can honor his crucial role in declaring our nation’s independence from Britain—he was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, after all—and allow that to make less important the fact that he openly spoke of Black people as inferior beings, fathered children with teenaged female slaves, and supported the idea of “removing” native Americans from their own land and resettling them west of the Mississippi. There are rational, reasonable arguments on both sides, and for one simple reason: because all of the above details are true. So the debate is by its nature destined to be complex and complicated because Jefferson himself, a man who behaved in many ways that were totally at odds with his own philosophy and politics, was a complex and complicated creature. Both sides have lots of good points to make. The decision to remove the statue and send it to the New York Historical Society, where it will presumably be presented to the public in a way that sets the man in his historical perspective, only pleased some of the people engaged in the debate. But there’s no real question—not in my mind, at any rate—that there were valid, cogent arguments to be made on both sides of the issue. And that’s how democracy is supposed to work: everybody speaks freely, no one is silenced in advance, and then the majority rules.

And that brings me back to Texas. The bill, now a law, mentioned above requires that teachers present both sides to a debate when presenting that debate to impressionable children. But a path paved with virtuous paving stones can still lead to hell. And so, just this last week, we heard Gina Peddy, the executive director of curriculum and instruction in the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, a suburb of Dallas/Forth Worth, comment in a training session for teachers that if they were going to have a few books in their classroom libraries about the Shoah, then they should be sure also to offer students books written from an “opposing perspective.” Nor was this notion implied or merely suggested: “Make sure if you have a book on the Holocaust,” Executive Director Peddy said unequivocally, “that you [also] have one that has an opposing [viewpoint], that has other perspectives.” Nor can we imagine that the Executive Director unintentionally misspoke herself. “How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one flabbergasted teacher asked in response. “Believe me,” Peddy said slightly mysteriously, “that’s come up.”

Another teacher asked how precisely this was supposed to work. Imagine, this teacher proposed, that a classroom library contains the famous book by Lois Lowry, “Number the Stars,” detailing the escape of a girl from a Copenhagen Jewish family from the Nazis. Was Executive Director Peddy suggesting that the classroom should also feature pro-Nazi books promoting the notion that the Germans absolutely had the right to exterminate the Jews of Denmark if they wished? It wasn’t clear if Peddy heard the question. But what is clear is that she failed to answer it.

The reaction to Peddy’s remarks was ferocious and immediate. A spokesperson for the Texas State Teachers Association, Clay Robison, said unequivocally that his organization considers it “reprehensible for an educator to require a Holocaust denier to get equal treatment with the facts of history. That’s absurd. It’s worse than absurd. And this law does not require it.” Those are stirring words. But is Spokesperson Robison right about the law? That’s the real question here!

The author of the law, State Senator Brian Hughes, was clear enough, saying unambiguously that the law does not require teachers to present opposing viewpoints in matters of “good and evil” or to present pro-Nazi books if they also present books about the Shoah. Nor would the law require teachers who teach about slavery in Texas or anywhere to include reading assignments that would expose children to authors who promoted slavery as an acceptable institution or who attempted to justify ante-bellum slavery in the United States with reference to the natural inferiority of Black people. Of course, no one in his or her right mind would propose an even-handed approach to slavery. Or do I just want to think that that is the case?

What it comes down to—for Texas and for all of us—is understanding the difference between legitimate debate about complex, nuanced issues and the ridiculousness of debating historical or scientific reality. Debating whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned would be a reasonable exercise for high school students. And, in such a case, why shouldn’t they be presented with thoughtful arguments on both sides of the abortion issue? That’s precisely how education in a free society is supposed to work, after all—by exposing young people to both sides in a principled debate and then allowing them to formulate their own opinions based on what they’ve learned. But to extend that notion to people who promote ideas that are rooted solely in bigotry and racial or ethnic hatred and to feel some sort of obligation to let children be exposed to their ideas as well—that is just lunacy.

If we as a nation cannot say—unequivocally and unambiguously—that Nazism was an evil and not an “alternate viewpoint” that deserves its day in court, then we have truly descended into true craziness. The kerfuffle in Texas seems to have died down. No one is actually insisting that teachers expose children to pro-Nazi or pro-slavery books if they teach materials about the Nazi war against the Jews or about the misery and degradation slaves were obliged to endure in the Old South. But the very fact that this matter came up for debate at all is worrisome. Are there actually people out there—including the curriculum directors of school districts—who think of the Shoah as a theory to be accepted or rejected and not at all as a historical fact? Apparently, there are. And that distressing and disturbing detail far outweighs in importance the happy ending of this single incident in Texas.