After taking a couple of weeks in the glorious woods of Maine to recover from the nausea caused by considering the Texas Republican Platform, I've managed to repress the trauma and take another look at the document which represents the hopes and dreams of a hundred crazy special interest groups in all their fevered glory.

Educating Our Children

The first section after the reprehensible section on family values, which I covered in my last installment, addresses the one family value which they seem not to have gotten completely wrong: education. This section includes strong support for parental rights and more local control of education, including cutting down educational bureaucracy, making educators more accountable to the public and a sort of vague endorsement of school choice.

There are some interesting and surprising ideas in this section. There's a call to abolish the Department of Education. There's a call to abolish the 'No Child Left Behind' program, coupled with an endorsement of 'Knowledge Based Education', which I guess is the alternative. Not surprising since we're dealing with Texas, there's a ringing endorsement for corporal punishment in the schools. There's a plank opposing multiculturalism and one opposing bilingual education. Perhaps my favorite is a clear statement supporting the efforts made by the legislature to encourage the hiring of teachers with knowledge in specific fields rather than general education degrees, which is a very good idea for improving the quality of the teaching force.

Inevitably, things go south before the section wraps up. First there's the section on 'Religious Freedom in Public Schools', which not surprisingly, wants to protect the right of students to engage in organized public prayer in school, though it does oppose any government or school sponsored prayer. It also makes a peculiar request for "the Legislature to end censorship of discussion of religion in our founding documents," which seems bizarre considering the almost total absence of any discussion of religion in any of our founding documents. Perhaps the Platform Committee's ignorance of our founding documents is a sign of where the problems lie in our public school system.

The moralists and religious extremists get in a few more hits, with an extremely disappointing section supporting 'equal treatment' of so-called Intelligent Design and a recommendation for a prohibition on any counseling of students on reproductive rights or contraception. Yet overall this is one of the more interesting and sensible sections in the platform.

Promoting Individual Freedom and Personal Safety

This section starts out with one of the strongest endorsements of gun rights I've ever seen.  It includes total opposition to any regulation of firearms, opposition to taxes on guns or ammunition, opposition to gun registration, and support for the right to carry concealed weapons in public buildings, at schools and at work.