Good morning! My name is Frank Gaffney. I am currently President of the Institute for the American Future. I previously had the privilege of acting as an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Ronald Reagan.
The President often warned that “Every generation faces an existential threat to freedom” and that our country must be protected from it and passed on to the next generation to do the same.
At issue before this Board is whether you, on behalf of the State of Texas, will prepare those children for this harsh reality? With your choices about curriculum frameworks, required reading and standards for textbooks, will you equip them to understand what previous generations did to ensure that we enjoy the freedoms too many of us take for granted?
In particular, will you motivate them to recognize and help confront now-gathering, “existential threats” – both foreign and domestic – that will afflict their generations?
Or will you do the seemingly easier thing and accede to insistent demands that they be taught our country is irremediably flawed, indeed evil, and, so, is unworthy of defending.
Will you, by your choices, make it a virtual certitude that the children of this state, and countless others around the nation, therefore fail to do their part to preserve freedom?
Will you ensure they instead submit to our enemies’ false and subversive – but highly seductive – narratives and lose the country as a result.
Each of you freely took an oath of office that requires you to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of this state.” In my professional judgment, the curriculum framework approved last year is consistent with that solemn oath.
I respectfully call on this Board to reject efforts that would cause you to violate your oath by altering or supplanting that framework. After all, the practical, and indeed the intended, effect of such efforts will be to encourage our children to decline their essential role in securing our nation and freedoms. And that can only accelerate the triumph of one or another of our enemies in the “Red-Green-Blue axis” – namely, the sharia-supremacists, the communists and globalists.