For Immediate Release
Contact: Michael Soto (cell: 210-685-8378)
San Antonio, Texas - September 22, 2010

Statement by Michael Soto, Democratic Party nominee for the State Board of Education in District 3, in response to SBOE "pro-Islamic/anti-Christian bias" resolution:

If this narrow-minded resolution were being considered anywhere besides the Texas State Board of Education, I would assume that I was reading satire rather than an earnest attempt at public policy-making. This pointlessly distracting, embarrassingly intolerant resolution is based on so-called analysis that makes a mockery of reading comprehension and, worse yet, of serious efforts to improve Texas public schools.

Even if the content analysis behind this resolution was accurate--and others have already pointed out its inaccuracies--it nevertheless betrays a short-sighted understanding of how books work. It makes a mockery of serious reading. According to the same standards held up by this resolution, Milton's marvelous Christian epic, Paradise Lost, would be considered an anti-Christian text because it gives considerably more "air time," more than twice as much, to Satan than to the Christian God. (And it gives roughly equal space to the Christian God and to non-Christian gods other than Satan.) To read Paradise Lost in this perverse way misses the point altogether. Similarly, the Book of Revelations features the "beast" far more prominently than it does Jesus Christ, a roughly five-to-one imbalance; this SBOE resolution would likely conclude that the New Testament tome is somehow anti-Christian.

I'm irked that I must waste my time thinking about such nonsense. But I'm far more upset that the SBOE is allowing itself to be distracted by such mean-spirited trivia when it should be figuring out how to fund public school textbooks in the face of a $21 billion budget deficit, when it should be working on new ways to stem the dropout crisis, when it should be giving teachers the tools that they need to prepare our kids for college.

Yet again I must say: Texas kids deserve better than this.

After attending public schools in Brownsville ISD throughout his childhood, Soto received a B.A. degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University. He is presently associate professor of English and director of the McNair Scholars Program at Trinity University. He lives in San Antonio with his wife Celina Peña and their sons Alejo (a second-grade student in the San Antonio ISD) and Américo (SAISD class of 2028).

The counties in SBOE District 3 are Atascosa, Bee, Bexar, Brooks, Duval, Frio, Hidalgo, Jim Wells, Karnes, Live Oak, McMullen, Medina, and Wilson.

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