The California Board of Education is facing a lawsuit over a proposal to include “ethnic studies” in new curriculum that reportedly requires students to pray to the gods of the Aztec Empire.
The Thomas More Society, which is based near Chicago, filed suit last week on behalf of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, which opposed the Golden State’s affirmative action measure, as well as state taxpayers in general.
Late last month, the legal group wrote a letter to the California board demanding that officials delete the Aztec prayer from the curriculum, but after receiving no response, proceeded to file the lawsuit which alleges that teaching the lesson is a violation of state law which prohibits the teaching of “religion” in taxpayer-funded schools.
Thomas More Society special counsel Paul Jonna noted that kids in California ought not to be required or otherwise pressured to take part in the Aztec prayer, especially if their parents have civil or religious objections to it.
“Our clients have both a religious and civic objection to the Aztec prayer, and they do not want their children chanting it, being asked or pressured to do so, or risking ostracism if they refuse,” Jonna said in the letter.
“Under both the California and the United States Constitutions, they have the right to expect all branches of the state government, including the State Board of Education and the Department of Education, to respect this choice. Furthermore, all Californians have the right to expect that tax-supported public schools will not aid or promote this religion,” Jonna continued.
The state introduced its new “ethnic studies” materials in March after it was promoted by someone who thinks that in order to address colonialism, “counter-genocide” of “white Christians” must occur, Daily Wire reported.
The curriculum, among other things, asks students to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs and practices on multiple levels.”
In addition, the materials include a chant exalting Aztec gods Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli, the war god, as well as others.
In part, the chant says:
In order to be warriors of love, of love, for our gente, representin’ justice, justice, local to global, global to local, global to local, ecological and social, social, justice, justice.
Not just thinkin’ and takin’ but makin’ things happen, with agency resiliency, and a revolutionary spirit.
Transformation, liberation, education, emancipation, imagination, revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education emancipation.
The president of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, Frank Xu, said that the chants indicate that California is supporting “unlawful government preference” towards Aztec religious beliefs, the Daily Wire noted.
“The curriculum’s unequivocal promotion of five Aztec gods or deities through repetitive chanting and affirmation of their symbolic principles constitutes an unlawful government preference toward a particular religious practice,” he said.
“This public endorsement of the Aztec religion fundamentally erodes equal education rights and irresponsibly glorifies anthropomorphic, male deities whose religious rituals involved gruesome human sacrifice and human dismemberment,” Xu added.
City Journal reported in March, when the curriculum was introduced, that the effort is part of an effort to “extend the Left’s cultural dominance of California’s public university system, 50 years in the making, to the state’s entire primary and secondary education system, which consists of 10,000 public schools serving a total of 6 million students.”
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Jon is a staff writer for BizPac Review with 30 years' worth of reporting experience, as well as an author and U.S. Army veteran. He has a BA in political science from Ashford University and an MA in national security studies/intelligence analysis from American Military University.
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