Preference for myth

Tennessee teabaggers want to whitewash history by law.  They want to make sure that public school teachers cannot criticize the Founders:

"No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership."

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address "an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another."

These teabaggers want the myth they believed as naive children without all those messy non-white people.  They want hagiography unrelieved by any evidence at all that the Founders were human beings like us, that they made mistakes, that they politicked in ways often as hardball as we do.

This conflict is the central conflict of the culture war.  We believe in following the evidence where it leads.  They believe in suppressing any evidence that their beliefs are unsupportable - the pre-Enlightenment view.

(h/t Salon and Huffington Post)