Over on Daily Kos, a few diarists have pointed out that one of the planks on the current Texas Republican platform states that the party opposes teaching "critical thinking" skills in schools.  Those who don't follow the Christian Right might understandably believe this means that they want to dumb down and disempower the masses so that they don't have the critical thinking skills to question the dominant-minority Republican world-view... and that it reflects the "stupid" at the heart of the Republican party.

This may well be the end result, but how we get there is a bit more nuanced than that. But no less scary. In fact, quite a bit more scary.  Unpacking a few key terms and phrases show that this and most all the other planks are organized around the Christian Reconstructionist, "theonomist" reformulation of covenant theology.  This is the view that God has established several "governments" or spheres, including civil, ecclesiastical (church), family, and individual or self-government (that last one can only be exercised by Christians--the right kind of Christians).  Christian Reconstructionists have adopted this from the Westminster Confession of the English Civil War and Cromwellian Puritan commonwealth. All the spheres of government are under God's authority, not the state's.  And who determines and exercises God's authority?  The super-duper "Christians" who are appropriately educated outside the civil system, either through homeschooling, "classical" Christian schools, or as supplemented by their fam