Texas promised to return control to moms and dads. Then Austin mandated Protestant-flavored Bible passages and Ten Commandments posters in every classroom — while politically performative local school boards flipped library access from opt-out to opt-in, taking control away from parents.
I spent ten of my first 13 years of schooling in ultra-conservative private Catholic schools. The Ten Commandments were posted exactly nowhere. Not in a single classroom. What we did have was a Freedom Shrine — framed replicas of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. That was the message: know your country, know your rights, know how to think for yourself.
In those same schools we read, dissected, and discussed many of the books now banned by supposed “conservative” forces trying to protect children. The inability to recognize and address evil is in itself dangerous. You cannot avoid what you cannot recognize.
Fast-forward to 2026 in Texas public schools. Every classroom must now display a state-mandated poster of the Ten Commandments under SB 10, which was signed last year and upheld by the 5th Circuit in April. The Texas State Board of Education gave preliminary approval in April to a new K-12 literary canon that includes a dozen specific Bible passages — the Golden Rule, the Prodigal Son, Jonah and the Whale, the Beatitudes, Psalm 23, and more.
A final vote on these selections comes next month; if it passes, these become required reading starting in 2030. The versions chosen are overwhelmingly Protestant — King James, English Standard, NIV Reader’s — with just one Jewish Tanakh excerpt. No Catholic translation. Yet the Catholic Church is the one that canonized the New Testament — establishing its official 27-book list — more than 1,200 years before King James ever commissioned his Protestant version in 1611. No Quran. No Hindu or Buddhist texts. What about those parents? What message is being sent to children about the choices their parents have made?
All of this is being sold under the banner of “parents in charge.” Just not Catholic or Jewish parents. Neither Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist nor agnostic parents. Apparently, only certain Christian flavors constitute “we the people” in Texas — separation of church and state be damned. The definition of “the public” is now apparently defined by King James.
Remember the 2020–2023 wave? In Southlake, Grapevine-Colleyville, Keller, and other Tarrant County districts, conservative candidates swept school boards with the help of groups like Southlake Families PAC and Patriot Mobile Action. The pitch was clear: enough with the “woke indoctrination,” enough with DEI and CRT sneaking into classrooms. Parents were finally going to take back control of what their kids learn.
Now look at the result. The same movement that railed against top-down mandates from Austin or the Biden administration has turned around and cheered statewide mandates on religious content. Local boards, local teachers, and — most importantly — local parents get zero say. The state decided for them.
This is the flim-flam. When “parental rights” meant pushing back against progressive curriculum, it was sacred. Now that the state is inserting its own preferred religious material, suddenly “parental rights” means whatever Austin wants it to mean. Opt-outs? Practically nonexistent once something is glued to every classroom wall or baked into the required reading list. The principle that government has no business dictating worldview has been quietly discarded — as long as it’s our worldview.
The same inconsistency shows up in the library battles. True parental control would be simple: keep age-appropriate books on the shelves by default. If a mom or dad objects to a specific title, they opt their own child out with a quick form. That respects every family without punishing everyone else.
Instead, local school boards did a performative flip of library access from opt-out to opt-in, taking control away from parents. Texas laws like HB 900 and SB 13 have been layered on top in districts like GCISD, Keller ISD, and others. Books with “challenging themes” or anything labeled “sexually relevant” get removed or moved into parental-consent areas. Kids now need active opt-in permission just to check them out — even timeless classics like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Take Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner — a modern classic spanning more than 300 pages. Roughly 13 of those pages describe the brutal rape of a boy in rural Afghanistan. The scene is not prurient; it is harrowing, and it shows the moral depths from which the protagonist must rise. That single chapter has been enough to sequester the entire novel behind permission-slip walls in multiple Texas districts. This is despite the book being used for almost a generation prior to 2023 to address themes of redemption, historical context, and diverse cultures.
Yet the same policymakers have no problem mandating Bible passages for every public-school student — passages drawn from a book that itself contains far more explicit material, including the Song of Solomon, a poetic allegorical celebration of physical love that reads like an ancient sex manual.
A better approach would be to let schools present moral and ethical ideas from many traditions side by side — the Bible alongside passages from the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran, the Dhammapada of Buddhism, and the Analects of Confucius. Students could compare the Golden Rule as it appears in Christianity (“Do unto others…”), Judaism, Islam (“None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself”), Hinduism, and Buddhism. They would discover that the core principles of honesty, compassion, justice, and personal responsibility are not the exclusive property of any one faith or culture.
That kind of comparative study doesn’t weaken morality — it reveals its universality. And it forces children to do the real work of critical thinking: evaluate competing claims, weigh evidence, test ideas against their own conscience, and decide for themselves what rings true within the context of their home upbringing. When schools hand children only one approved viewpoint — whether that viewpoint is Protestant Bible passages on the wall or secular dogma in the curriculum — they never learn to evaluate anything. They simply absorb. That is not education. That is indoctrination, no matter whose flag it flies.
The state didn’t trust parents to decide for their own kids. It was decided for all of them. That’s not parental control. That’s government control dressed up in parent-friendly language.
The flim-flam isn’t left or right. It’s any adult faction that treats public schools as a captive audience for its ideology — whether that ideology comes wrapped in rainbow flags or in King James verses. Kids don’t arrive in kindergarten pre-labeled as evangelical, conservative, liberal, or anything else. Real parental rights would mean giving every family the freedom to guide their own children’s moral and political formation without the state picking winners.
The only honest education teaches children how to think, not what to believe, whether the topic is politics or scripture. The classroom should be a place for critical thinking, not a battleground for whichever side won the last election in Austin.
Parents in charge? Not when the state and performative “conservative” school boards are the ones writing the script. At that point, it’s just pearl-clutching hypocrisy — the very indoctrination they claimed to oppose.