Tea partiers push to remove criticisms of Founding Fathers from textbooks. Tea party activists in Tennessee are pushing state legislators to amend curriculum in a way that eliminates criticisms of the Founding Fathers’ treatment of Native Americans and holding of slaves, according to a news item.

Roughly two-dozen tea partyers demanded that their state lawmakers modify textbook standards to ‘compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government,’ the Memphis-based The Commercial Appeal reports.

‘Neglect and outright ill,’ they said in literature disseminated at a news conference, ‘have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States.’

The group’s spokesman Hal Rounds, an attorney, lamented there was ‘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.’

‘The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed,’ Rounds said, as quoted by the newspaper.

He and his fellow activists pushed for new state curriculum standards that asserted: ‘No portrayal of minority experience […]