Democrats and the Bible

This is a story that I wanted to get to yesterday, but I wasn't able to. Didn't have time to get to it. It seems, as Alabamian from Red States Diaries commented, that yesterday was backwards day in Montgomery as the Alabama House Education Committee, in a party-line vote, approved a high school Bible course using the textbook The Bible and Its Influence. So what was backwards about it? The party that voted to approve the measure was the Democrats.

Ironic, huh?

Even more ironic are quotes like this:

"I know what this is about. This is more than about God. This is about politics."

And

"This bill is unneeded and frivolous."

What's funny about these quotes? The first was by Rep. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, and the second by Alabama Christian Coalition President John Giles.

Alabama isn't the only state in which this is occuring. In an article in yesterday's New York Times, it was reported that the same battle is being played out in Georgia as well, with Democrats pushing the measure through and Republicans playing the part of the opposition.

In Georgia, the proposal marked a new course for the Democratic Party. The state's Democrats, including some sponsors of the bill, opposed a Republican proposal a few years ago to authorize the teaching of a different Bible course, which used a translation of the Scriptures as its text, calling it an inappropriate endorsement of religion. The sponsors say they are introducing their Bible measure now partly to pre-empt a potential Republican proposal seeking to display the Ten Commandments in schools.

And it gets even better:

"Their proposal makes them modern-day pharisees," State Senator Eric Johnson of Georgia, the Republican leader from Savannah, said in a statement. "This is election-year pandering using voters' deepest beliefs as a tool."

Saying he found "a little irony" in the fact that the Democratic sponsors had voted against a Republican proposal for a Bible course six years ago, Mr. Johnson added, "It should also be noted that the so-called Bible bill doesn't use the Bible as the textbook, and would allow teachers with no belief at all in the Bible to teach the course."

Betty Peters, a Republican on the Alabama school board who opposed the initiative in that state, also dismissed the initiative as "pandering." Democrats, she argued, had adopted a new strategy: "Let's just wrap ourselves in Jesus."

And how does the Republican Party's favorite Pharisee, Howard Dean, feel about all this?

"We have done it in a secular way, and we don't have to," he said, adding, "I think teaching the Bible as literature is a good thing."

Gee. That sounds almost...rational. My God. Democrats can talk about God. *collective gasp*

All of this contraversy is being centered around the textbook The Bible and Its Influence.

It was produced by the nonpartisan, ecumenical Bible Literacy Project and provides an assessment of the Bible's impact on history, literature and art that is academic and detached, if largely laudatory.

How teaching the Bible as literature is contraversial to Republicans is beyond me. Election year politics are always wacky.