"To secure the people's right to acknowledge God: The right to
pray or acknowledge religious belief, heritage or tradition on
public property, including public schools, shall not be infringed.
The government shall not compel joining in prayer, initiate or
compose school prayers, discriminate against or deny a benefit on
account of religion.
When the textbook publisher, Houghton Mifflin (HM), came under fire
last year with accusations of proselytizing Islam, Forrest Turpen,
Executive Director of CEAI, publicly defended the textbook.
TruthorFiction.com noted the "Christian group" and wrote "Turpin
(sic)
says the teaching about Islam has not been "slipped" into the
curriculum…In fact," says Turpin, "the state of California has been a
leader in requiring a balance of teaching about who we are and what has
empowered us as a civilization."
BlessedCause, the organization that originally complained about the
Islamic propaganda, wrote to Forrest Turpen and asked why he endorsed the textbook. Turpen wrote:
"…we focused only our attention on the Christian perspectives that were
written and did not look at or compare the other content of the
texts...In essence we did no evaluation of the other religions addressed
in any of the textbooks of the HM series."
No evaluation. Yet Mr. Turpen, representing a "Christian group,"
defended HM and quelled public outrage.
BlessedCause continued correspondence with Dan Elliott, Vice Chairman
of CEAI, confirmed CEAI did not evaluate the 7th grade
textbook: "We did not review the information about islam but only some
limited sections of one text book about Christianity."
If Christian Educators did not evaluate the Islam unit, why was
Turpen quoted like an expert representing Christians and defend the
Islam unit at TruthorFiction? BlessedCause asked CEAI to retract their
statements. CEAI refused. (details)
