A few members of the Utah State Board of Education apparently think that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were Marxists, or even Soviet-style communists.
Which is a neat trick for people who were building the American republic 42 years before Karl Marx was born, and rebuilding it 54 years before the Bolshevik Revolution even happened.
America’s great leaders are sometimes credited with being able to see far into the future. But this is ridiculous.
Early this month, five members of the state school board brought up a resolution condemning all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs that might still exist in the state’s schools as “Marxist” or “Soviet.”
The resolutions even included a few Russian words that, these members said, proved that equity is key to Marxist philosophy and the Soviet state.
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Maybe. Though it would be difficult to prove that any actual policy of the Soviet state, at least after Josef Stalin came to power, succeeded in treating any ethnicity or disfavored group as equal before the law.
If equality is bad, then why do Utah schools still teach the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address? (Assuming they do.)
The key thought in Jefferson’s Declaration should be well known to all:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
OK. Today, if anyone tried to express the same sentiments, they might say “all persons” (as the Constitution later did) rather than “all men.” And the religious references might be toned down or eliminated.
Then there was the opening of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
All men are created equal? How communist can you get?
It wasn’t just the speech. It was what came later. The 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, and the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights for all.
The 14th Amendment proved necessary because of the widespread, at the time, argument that the Fifth Amendment, which promised the same thing, only restrained the federal government and not the states. Thus the need for the Equal Protection Clause, governing state behavior, in the 14th.
The school board quickly voted down the resolution by a vote of 10-4. (Even one of the members who originally proposed it wound up voting in the negative in the face of significant blowback from the public.)
In that same meeting, board members also rejected a proposed resolution to favor Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. That’s a move that one of Trump’s newest toadies, Gov. Spencer Cox, also supports.
The argument, of course, is that the governance of education is best left to the states or to local school boards. The counter-argument is that education is too important to be left to each state or community, because those that do it badly lower the intelligence and abilities of the entire nation.
Like people who think that equality is a Marxist idea.
Maybe some Utahns are just upset that the feds too often come along and call out local school districts for rampant and damaging racism. As the DOE has done in the Davis County School District.
The fact that the board rejected both of these motions suggests that maybe it has a purpose and should be allowed to continue.
If they had approved the motions, it would be time to argue that the Utah State Board of Education and Utah Department of Education should also be eliminated.
The case could be made that the state board and department — more so than the federal education bureaucracy, which funnels a ton of money to states and localities — don’t really provide anything of value. The money comes from local property taxes and allocations from the Utah Legislature.
And if we are talking staying close to the people, then why do we need anything but the local school boards?
If, that is, we would require local school board members to pass an American history and civics test, the kind that some members of the state board would obviously flunk.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle is opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune.
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