Yes, let's celebrate freedom by imposing requirements on schools. The last thing that the dumbest Kansas Legislature of all time should be doing is meddling in education, but if they're going to do it can't they at least do it without being hypocrites? Some of these legislators are the same dim bulbs that are arguing against the Common Core because it's supposedly a product of "government bureaucrats in Washington." Apparently mandates from government bureaucrats in Topeka are OK though.

It will certainly be interesting for school children to learn that Jefferson was concerned with freedom from religious authority. In order to understand the "religious references in the writings" the kids can learn about the Jefferson Bible, in which Jefferson edited out the supernatural parts and everything that he considered to be religious dogma.

And don't forget to discuss the freedom of African Americans as it's celebrated in those writings of the founding fathers...Oops! Never mind.

"The religious references in the writings of the founding fathers shall not be censored when presented as part of such instruction."

I certainly hope this is done. Many of the founding fathers had interesting things to say about religion.

"The religious references in the writings of the founding fathers shall not be censored when presented as part of such instruction."

Let's see the full panoply of what the Founders believed about religion taught in public schools, then, too.

For instance: the fact that there is no mention of Christianity, or the Christian god, or Jesus, in any of the founding documents of our country.

Or, from Founding Father and author of the Declaration of Independence, President Jefferson alone:

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

(The common law is what U.S. law is based upon.)

"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity." —Notes on Virginia, 1782

"Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination." —Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes." —Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.

"Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being."

—Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, April 13, 1820

Or are Kansans too afraid to confront the reality of what the Founders thought?