Oklahoma lawmaker: I don't want "pink-haired" atheists teaching the Bible in schools

State Sen. David Bullard wants to force the Bible into classrooms. He just doesn't want atheist teachers having a say in how it's taught.

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Oklahoma State Sen. David Bullard is one of those Christian Nationalists who thinks his purpose in the legislature is to force his religion on everyone in the state. For example, he’s already filed a bill to resurrect Ten Commandments monuments inside and outside the State Capitol (despite previous attempts getting shot down or declared illegal).

But in his latest attempt to push mythology on children under the guise of “history,” he accidentally gave away the game during an interview with Christian pseudo-historian David Barton.

Oklahoma State Senator David Bullard (screenshot via YouTube)

On Wednesday, Bullard appeared on The Wallbuilders Show with Barton to talk about how he was promoting the Bible in the legislature. Bullard praised extremist Ryan Walters, the controversial and incompetent Superintendent of Public Instruction, before saying Walters was limited in what he could do. After all, Walters can create new rules, but superintendents are well aware they can just ignore them—and many have. Therefore, Bullard said, it was up to the legislature to codify laws that would be harder to undo.

At one point, he brought up how Walters has been trying to get (Trump) Bibles in the classroom, which he supports, but he quickly added that even that action could be a problem if the wrong sort of person (wink wink) was at the front of the classroom.

Since I have been in [the legislature], I have fought to force our teachers to actually use primary sources to teach our Christian heritage and its impact on our founding documents. [Walters has] been fighting that fight through his implementation of the Bible in schools. And I think that there's a lot of benefit to looking at that. We need to be specific there. I don't want some pink-haired person who doesn't believe in God to start trying to teach the Bible. So I want to make sure we're teaching it specifically.

I’ve run that bill this year, that's Senate Bill 850, that one actually gives them, I think it's 20 different quotes from the founding fathers on our Christian and constitutional heritage. It would require that to be taught in every history class.

So it’s not enough that the Bible be taught in schools. Bullard wants to make sure some “pink-haired” atheist has no say in how the Bible gets taught because (gasp) she might teach kids about genocide, rape, incest, or all the other horrible acts condoned by the Christian God.

He could just as easily have said he doesn’t want Muslims or Jews teaching the Bible and it would have been equally as offensive. These people don’t merely want the Bible to be taught. They want it to be taught their way, in whatever manner makes the Bible look good, context be damned. They want public schools turned into Sunday schools. They want kids listening to sermons, not thinking critically about the text in front of them. More importantly, they want certain parts of the Bible to be taught by Christians like them because the possibility of kids encountering that book through a different lens is a death sentence for their preferred form of indoctrination.

Now consider the bill Bullard was referencing: Senate Bill 850. That bill, currently in the Education Committee, would force social studies teachers to teach the “original intent of the founding fathers while constructing the United States Constitution.”

To that end, Bullard includes 14 quotations from various men about the Bible. Many of them have nothing to do with the Constitution. The list includes out-of-context quotations from guys like John Adams and Daniel Webster (who weren’t even framers of the Constitution). There’s also one from Noah Webster, a minister whose listed statement about Christianity was written several decades after the Constitution was enacted.

If the goal here is to teach the “original intent of the founding fathers” when they wrote the Constitution, virtually none of these quotations would be useful since many were written afterwards and none of their thoughts were incorporated into the final document.

There’s a reason the quotations don’t include any primary sources or the year in which they were written. It would give away the charade.

Bullard isn’t interested in honesty or history. His joy comes from lying to children, and he wants to force teachers to do that work on his behalf by shoving a series of random quotations from random men into the classroom, knowing full well that teachers won’t be given resources to provide proper context or won’t have the background to understand why all this is bullshit.

Teachers do not want politicians micro-managing their curriculum, but it’s so much worse when Republicans attempt to infest their classrooms with utter bullshit.

Bullard must know Oklahoma is one of the worst states in the country when it comes to education, and his only goal is to make sure it’s the absolute worst.

And he definitely doesn’t want atheists teaching this material because we might have the good sense to call out this bullshit for what it is.

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