It is always good sport to tweak the noses of American religious fundamentalists, particularly at election time, and you can never say they don't need tweaking, as the revelation that some of Louisiana's schools are to benefit from remarkable textbooks indicates.
Under a voucher system introduced by the state's governor Bobby Jindal – a rising star of the Republican party – pupils attending 119 schools in the state, many of them run by the religious right, will be reading textbooks which tell them that dinosaurs co-existed with humans, slaves did not have it so bad and the Ku Klux Klan had some good points. Oh, and that Mark Twain was hopeless and Emily Dickinson, who spent much of her life shut up in her house in Amherst writing poetry, was presumptuous and disrespectful – both of them because they apparently had doubts about the beneficence of the Almighty.
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