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For as much as Thomas Jefferson WAS an Enlightened Man, he did not contribute to that which is coined "The Enlightenment" He learned from it, he learned from these great noted Philosophers and Writers. To say that Thomas Jefferson was Part of the Enlightenment would be inappropriate, as he was a slave owner. That is why, through his education and learning about the Enlightenment, he was so vocally against slavery.
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this is both historically wrong and logically incoherent. as a major force in articulating the goals of the american revolution, jefferson is both a figure of the enlightenment, whatever that ultimately means (it's usually synonymous with secularization, which is obviously why the texas school board wants to erase it, replace it with absurdities like calvin and aquinas) AND a significant figure within it. the question of slavery is not a defining feature of enlightenment figures. if it had been, you wouldn't have seen...o i dunno....the european reaction to the haitian revolution when the slave population of haiti had the audacity to imagine that ideas like the universal equality of man referred to them. you don't have the facts straight.
you don't know what sociology is.
you imagine that up to now there are no debates within a school cirriculum about separation of church and state? quite the contrary. what the ultra-right wants is to undermine the idea that there should be such a separation. that's the clear interpretation that one can arrive at simply by juxtaposing information *about which there is no dispute across reports** about what the texas school board did.
like i say, i find most of these moves to be the stuff undertaken by buffoons and because that's the case expect that it'll backfire pretty roundly on not only the school board but on the right in general. knowing that this is coming, it's convenient for the right to begin playing the victim now...o boo hoo poor us we're getting hostile press from these articles that say what the school board actually did.