It Is Remarkable That Someone Can Be Elected To Public Office And Be So Bloody Ignorant

Lawmaker: Students shouldn’t learn Declaration because of slavery

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Sam Rolley

A Democratic lawmaker in Louisiana believes public schools should skip teaching the Declaration of Independence because she believes it is racist.

The bill making its way through the Louisiana legislature would require schoolchildren to learn and recite the Declaration of Independence.

“The Declaration of Independence is the cornerstone of our republic,” Republican state Rep. Valarie Hodges, the bill’s sponsor, said. “The American mind is expressed in those documents.”

The law would have required students in grades four through six to recite a portion of the Declaration before class each day. Hodges said her hope was that by helping students become more familiar with the founding document, the students would become better informed citizens.

But after the bill won approval in the Louisiana House Education Committee, it began receiving the social justice treatment in the form of a deluge of amendments from Democratic lawmakers.

Via The Advocate:

Rep. Ed Price, D-Gonzales, prepared an amendment that would require students to recite a portion of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. Price noted that King’s speech is one of the most famous in U.S. history.

“It still has grown and grown and grown,” Price said. “It is repeated today by everybody.”

Price said the civil rights leader’s remarks especially resonate with African-Americans and the struggles to overcome slavery and the denial of voting rights.

“We fought a long way to get where we are today,” he said. “And I think Dr. King’s speech really personifies what has happened.”

Smith, D-Baton Rouge, prepared an amendment that would require students to recite a portion of the Declaration of Sentiments from the Women’s Rights Conference in Seneca Falls in 1848.

Smith said that gathering featured talk of women’s voting rights and other topics worth remembering.

“She (Hodges) just chose something that she felt was adequate,” Smith said. “But there was so much more that could have been looked at.”

Rep. Barbara Norton, D-Shreveport, had an amendment that would require students to recite the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — the post-Civil War addition that said everyone born or naturalized in the U.S., including African-Americans, were citizens of the nation.

Norton’s amendment is especially noteworthy because of the floor speech she gave attacking the Declaration as a racist document.

“I’m not really sure what your intent is, but one thing that I do know is, all men are not created equal,” she said.

And then it got weird.

“When I think back in 1776, July the 4th, African-Americans were slaves. And for you to bring a bill to request that our children would recite the Declaration, I think it’s a little bit unfair to us, to ask those children to recite something that’s not the truth,” Norton continued.

Norton later noted, “In 1776, Dr. King was not even born.”

She went on to call the Declaration “documents that was not even validated.”