Horrors!

The Texas Board of Education has passed through several "alterations" to the public school history and social studies curriculum in our state. The purpose they said, is to balance out the left-leaning bias of our current textbooks. Having read several articles and watched a few videos with interviews and reports on the subject, I have to say that I'm appalled. Many of the changes are blatantly racist and diminish the suffering of millions all to make past republicans look better.
Here's a link to a video and and two articles on the subject: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/textbooks-a-texas-dentist-could-love/
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts1253
Every single change is objectionable, but here are some of the worst. They plan to put a kinder spin on the anti-communist movement of the cold war era, which was a movement riddled with racism and fear tactics used to control the populous. They are removing references to hip-hop and replacing them with a higher emphasis on country, saying that hip-hop is not an important cultural movement. There is going to be a diminishing of our already bleak Latino history and culture education, and Thomas Jefferson is being removed from a list of influential writers because he supported logic over faith and is a non-Christian founding father (the horror!). In fact, a heavy emphasis is being placed on the founding fathers being entirely Christian, which is certainly not true; many of them were Deists, an enlightenment movement based in the idea that God doesn't give a shit, and a predecessor to Atheism.
The people who are being included makes the entire thing even more terrifying. General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederate army is now an example of good leadership (apparently, being a terrible racist makes you a good leader now). On the list of influential writers are John Calvin, William Blackstone, and St. Thomas Aquinus, all of them fundamentalist Christians. Also included as leaders of the "Conservative Resurgence" are the National Rifle Association, and the Moral Majority! I'd never actually heard of the latter until I wrote this, but I just did some research, and I'm shocked that anyone could, in 2010, feel it justified to acclaim a group that opposed the equal rights act (I'd like to be able to say that I'm also shocked that they would acclaim a group that pushed an anti-homosexual agenda, but sadly, I can't).
The leader of this pack of monstrous changes is Dr. McLeroy, a self-identified fundamentalist Christian who does not recognize the separation of church and state as a pertinent and important part of the United States constitution. He has blatantly diminished the work of women pushing the equal rights movement by saying that "The women didn't vote on [the Equal Rights Act], the men did, the men passed it for the women...The minorities were not able to do it by themselves, it took a majority to do it for themselves," and "Men gave women the right to vote." The offensiveness of those statements is ASTOUNDING.
I'm pretty sure that you all live in Texas, but if you don't (and even if you do), you'll be interested to know that, because Texas has the second highest population of any state in the country, many textbook companies cater to our laws, so this decision affects the entire country. This means, that all over the country, history is being altered and clipped because of Texas conservatives. I find this very disturbing. I propose we protest this terrible injustice!
I beg you all to leave a comment telling me exactly how you feel, if there are any developments, and if you have an propositions as to what is to be done.

Thing to be grateful for today: People who are properly horrified by all of this!