Shades of Spanish Inquisition: Oklahoma mandates public schools teach Bible, or else | Opinion

As the comedy troupe Monty Python once said, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

I certainly didn’t expect it in Oklahoma.

But Inquisition 2024 came to our neighboring state on Thursday, when Oklahoma’s authoritarian superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, issued an edict that every classroom from fifth to 12th grade must have a Bible in it, and every teacher, regardless of their own beliefs, has to teach from it — or else.

Walters, to put it bluntly, is a Christian nationalist, a dictator and a bully — constantly abusing his power of office to press his religious views on an entire state’s public school system and punishing anyone who would stand in his way.

He’s enabled by a state Board of Education that’s as bad as he is (more about them later).

The last time I wrote about this guy, he was carrying out a KGB-style purge to rid the state’s so-called Department of Education of “anyone that has a disagreement on Superintendent Walters’ beliefs to fight the liberal woke culture seeping into our schools.”

That line came from a warning memo by one of his henchmen that was coded so Walters could identify and fire anyone sharing his bizarre edicts with the press or the public.

This has been a rough month for Walters. He’s gotten slapped down twice by the Oklahoma Supreme Court for unconstitutional acts he’s committed in his personal vendetta against the public schools.

Early this month, the court ruled he overstepped his authority by threatening to downgrade the accreditation of the Edmond school district — one of the state’s best performing — if its board didn’t ban from its high school libraries two critically acclaimed books he doesn’t like, “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls and “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini.

And earlier this week, the court ruled Walters’ efforts to establish the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school was unlawful. “This State’s establishment of a religious charter school violates Oklahoma statutes, the Oklahoma Constitution, and the Establishment Clause (of the U.S. Constitution),” the court wrote in its ruling.

Following that decision, Walters vowed to fight back, and on Thursday he did in his typical iron-fisted fashion.

“We will be issuing a memo today, which every school district will adhere to, that every teacher, every classroom in the state, will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” he announced at a state Board of Education meeting.

His memo to the state’s school superintendents was even more chilling.

“Adherence to this mandate is compulsory. Further instructions for monitoring and reporting on this implementation for the 2024/25 school year will be forthcoming. Immediate and strict compliance is expected.”

Also at Thursday’s meeting, the Board of Education moved to revoke the teaching license of a former Norman high school teacher over her 2022 protest of a statewide book ban passed by the Oklahoma Legislature.

Instead of clearing her classroom shelves until her books could be “reviewed,” Summer Boismier draped red paper over the books with a QR code pointing to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online catalog of banned books.

Boismier ultimately resigned in protest and now works for the Brooklyn library, but has appealed to retain her Oklahoma teaching credentials. A hearing judge ruled that she had done nothing wrong and should be retained.

The board, which has the final say, unanimously rejected the judge’s decision and ordered the board’s lawyer to craft a list of reasons why Boismier should be stripped of her license to teach.

Simply put, politics and the culture wars are destroying Oklahoma’s education system from the inside out.

Their schools have dropped from the middle of the pack in state rankings to the point where the best that can be said now is that they’re consistently in the top 50 — just barely.

Here’s hoping that Kansas sees what’s going on with our neighbors to the south and resists going down the same road.

Because while Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch was hilarious, the Oklahoma Inquisition is no joke.

Oklahoma’s disastrous war on ‘woke’ teachers offers valuable lesson for Kansas | Opinion