Good morning, 

Here is today's Texas Minute.

– Michael Quinn Sullivan 

Thursday, August 20, 2020
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• A small private Christian school in Port Isabel is ready to take Cameron County to court over a restrictive policy that forbids them from beginning in-person instruction, setting up a potential standoff over religious liberty. David Vasquez reports that Laguna Madre Christian Academy, made up of only 20 students and five teachers, wants to start classes on time.
       
• The Cameron County administrator – Democrat County Judge Eddie Treviño – has banned all public and private schools from beginning in-person instruction until September 28. The school has retained legal counsel.
      
• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has written “local governments are prohibited from closing religious institutions or dictating mitigation strategies to those institutions. Local governments are similarly prohibited from issuing blanket orders closing religious private schools.”
      
• “Any effort by Cameron County to enforce its unlawful order of August 10, 2020, will be viewed as an affront to the religious liberty of LMCA and met with the strictest legal defense.” – First Liberty attorney Jeremy Dys
     
• Even before the county ban, the school was planning to follow multiple health and safety guidelines, including masks, temperature checks, screenings prior to entry, and socially distanced classrooms.

• Texans were stunned last year by the story of the Pardo family. They had been falsely accused of medical child abuse, resulting in Child Protective Services illegally removing a child from their home. Public attention and swift legal action saw the case dismissed and their children returned to the home.
   
• Yet to this day they remain listed on CPS’ “Child Abuse Registry.” Brandon Waltens has the story.
     
• Tim Lambert, the president of Texas Home School Coalition, says the action was “egregious” and “vindictive.”
   
• That might be putting it lightly. As it turns out, CPS has the ability – in the words of THSC – to “place innocent families on the Child Abuse Registry, even if they were never found guilty of abuse or neglect. Innocent families like the Pardos are placed on the registry completely at the whim of CPS right alongside people who commit horrible crimes against their children, such as starving, beating, torturing or killing them.”
   
• CPS is under the direct authority of Gov. Greg Abbott. THSC is soliciting donations to help cover the Pardo’s legal defense fund. 

• Collin County’s top elected official says he has “zero confidence” in the “inaccurate and unreliable” Chinese coronavirus data reported by the state, and he’s making sure his constituents know about it. Erin Anderson has the details.
   
• Republican County Judge Chris Hill said this week that the data being provided by the Texas Department of State Health Services and its Texas Health Trace tracking system is not accurate. Hill told county commissioners that the state’s data created a “false spike” in coronavirus cases. While the false reporting “drives the narrative... drives the dollars,” Hill said it does not serve the people.
       
• “How do I guide us through a disaster declaration when I have 100 percent certainty that the numbers I’ve been given are false.” – Collin County judge Chris Hill
     
• The state has continued to stand by its data reporting, even as it is continually caught making mistakes.

• Texas A&M was once considered a conservative institution – perhaps one of the last bastions of traditional values in higher education. In recent years, it has shifted left – if not yet as wildly as the University of Texas.
      
• CampusReform.org reports on the latest example: an anthropology professor Filipe Castro who spends his time slurring Republicans as Nazis, denigrating religion, and celebrating the “positive” coronavirus tests of conservative political figures.  
       
• The publication notes that reviews of Professor Castro indicate his rants aren’t limited to his off-hours, but occupy his lecture time. “He instead of teaching about the world taught about everything he thought was wrong with America from politics to religion.”
       
• Sadly, students and faculty alike tell me Professor Castro is becoming more the norm at Aggieland rather than the exception.
   
• Which, in turn, tells me – as an Aggie myself – that the “Core Values” of Texas A&M are becoming little more than a marketing scheme aimed at keeping conservative former students writing donations, rather than driving the institution’s approach to academic life. Texas A&M University’s Chancellor John Sharp and President Michael Young will either fix this growing problem, or be seen as enabling parts of it.