The Texas State Board of Education announced last week that it has hired anti-LGBTQ+ Christian Nationalist David Barton as an “expert content advisor” to revise the state’s social studies standards for public schools. Barton has no degree in history, and other scholars of history and law have described his work as highly flawed “pseudoscholarship” and “outright falsehoods.”

Texas announced Barton’s hiring in a September 19 letter, calling him a “recognized author of numerous works on American history” with a “commitment to historical accuracy.”

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Most of Barton’s books are sold through WallBuilders, a company of which he himself is the founder and president. His works repeatedly claim that the Founding Fathers didn’t intend any separation of church and state and only wanted to protect the free practice of monotheistic religions (rather than other non-Christian faiths).

Jay W. Richards, senior fellow at the Christian conservative Discovery Institute, said in 2012 that Barton’s works are full of “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC) describes Barton’s work as “anti-gay” “historical revisionism.”

“Barton has also demonized LGBTQ persons and communities, arguing that HIV and AIDS are god-given consequences for living out one’s LGBTQ life,” the SLPC wrote.