Texas Requires Bible Class in Public Schools

The Bible's history and literature will be required to be taught in public schools in Texas under a new law that has been clarified by the state attorney general to mean exactly what it says.

"This is a huge victory for the people of Texas and, I think, for people across the country for academic freedom," said Jonathan Saenz, a lawyer for Liberty Legal. "There are 1,300 references to the Bible in the works of Shakespeare alone. Over 60 percent of the allusions studied in [advanced placement] English come from the Bible. Students are going to be better academically and culturally when they hear about the Bible."

The decision is a result of work by the state legislature as well as an opinion from Greg Abbott, the state's attorney general, in a letter to Education Commissioner Robert Scott.

The question is, where will the texas Legislature be when schools are inevitably sued for violations of the Establishment Clause? It's one thing to teach the Bible as literature or history, and quite another to use the unconstitutional NCBCPS curriculum on the Bible.