History is History In California

Not just there, of course, but the Golden State now requires LGBT History in its textbooks. The problem with this is not merely the crass attempt by the state to prevent its citizens from imparting their own beliefs on the topic of the meaning of marriage to their children, but that it's an affront to the discipline of History and to truth itself.

What contributions means is unclear (surely no negative “contributions” will be mentioned), but it is sure to cause much discussion among the historians (or their simulacra) who write the textbooks. I do not envy them their task.
For example, in writing about Shays’ Rebellion, do the historians just write about Shays’ Rebellion per se, or must they first ask whether Daniel Shays and Job Shattuck had a “thing” for each other? Before allowing kids to read about Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, must the historians first ask how Lincoln’s disability (he was tall and ugly) made him feel, and would he had rather signed wearing a dress?
If they cannot find, in the traditional battery of events and people, those whose sexuality was non-heterosexual, others will have to be ferreted out from the record. This will not be an easy task, because records of men who slept with the husbands of others’ wives, or who slept with the both the husbands and their wives (separately or at once), or who wished they had rather had been a girl, were not kept with the ferocious assiduity they are today.
Certain creativity will thus have to be demonstrated by these writers. Speculations will have to be made. Lesser personalities and incidents will have to be magnified. What is important is not fidelity to the historical record, but what the history ought to have been, if only those in the past were as Enlightened as we now are.
Of course, with these new inclusions, and with the necessary limitations of space, some of that old stuff, like the constitutional debates and World War II, will have to be left out of textbooks. There is only so much time in the day, after all. And what’s more important? Learning about John Marshall and “Black Jack” Pershing or that the transgendered are people too? The question answers itself.

We are choosing, daily and inexorably, to reject liberty, truth and civilization and favor instead a geometrically accelerating descent into ignorance, license and barbarism.

Curtsy: American Digest