A few years ago, Cynthia Dunbar played a central role in the great Texas textbook controversies, moving to inject creationism into the curricula and eliminate Thomas Jefferson from American history — all while blasting public schools as “tyrannical” and calling for making the judicial branch “subordinate” to Congress. Now, she’s gunning for the Republican nomination for Virginia’s 6th congressional district.
And she appears favored to win — but not without stirring a brand new round of controversy that stems from watching the district GOP re-write the rules to all but ensure her nomination.
With Dunbar’s rise, national voices on both sides of the aisle are perking up about the controversy. After all, whoever comes out of Saturday’s convention for the Republican nomination seems close to a lock to win in November — except Dunbar, who Republicans fear will torpedo their chances at holding onto the solid red district.
Dunbar, who claims she’s an “American patriot,” first made waves nearly a decade ago when she helped kick off the greatest education-related controversy the country has seen in a generation.
As a member of the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE) from 2007 to 2010, Dunbar played a pivotal role in turning a local debate about American history into a country-wide conversation about the outsized role Texas educational policies play across the U.S. Along the way, Dunbar revealed the depths of revisionism she and her allies wanted to push across the state, and ultimately the nation.
From the outset, Dunbar’s placement on the TSBOE was an odd choice. An outspoken proponent of homeschooling, Dunbar — who had insisted that Barack Obama was a terrorist sympathizer — wrote a 2008 book entitled One Nation Under God: How the Left is Trying to Erase What Made us Great that laid out many of the policies she would later advocate. Among the lowlights that the Texas Freedom Network discovered:
- Dunbar believes the Founding Fathers, all evidence aside, created “an emphatically Christian government,” one that should require a “biblical litmus test” among government officials. Dunbar’s proposed changes would force all government officials to “have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.”
- She also believes that public schools are “clearly tyrannical,” and challenges any kind of “compulsory education.”
- In keeping with her fundamentalist beliefs, Dunbar argues that the separation of church and state is a fallacy — and notes, as The Roanoke Times wrote, that it’s “impossible to be both a Christian and a Democrat.”
- As if that weren’t enough, she would make the judicial branch “subordinate” to the legislative branch — effectively undoing one of the primary separations of power in the U.S.
Many of those suggestions eventually found their way into Dunbar’s proposals for Texas textbooks. These proposals sought to de-emphasize evolution, and inject the teaching of “intelligent designs” — a form of creationism — into teaching. As the Washington Post noted, Dunbar also “advanc[ed] the notion that the United States is a Christian nation,” and lent credence to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare” hearings during the 1950s.
Read the full story at Think Progress
