This article (via Panda's Thumb) made us giggle...at first (the giggling was quickly replaced by groaning). It seems that California is the battleground for a recent push by religiosos to rewrite the textbooks. This time, it's a little different than what you might expect:

Instigating the California debate were two US-based Hindu groups with long ties to Hindu nationalist parties in India. One, the Vedic Foundation, is a small Hindu sect that aims at simplifying Hinduism to the worship of one god, Vishnu. The other, the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF), was founded in 2004 by a branch of the right-wing Indian group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

This year, as California's Board of Education commissioned and put up for review textbooks to be used in its 6th-grade classrooms, these two groups came forward with demands for substantial changes.

These demands include the rewriting of history books to indicate that ancient India didn't have segregated sexes — no, it was just that men had different dharma from women — any more than they had segregated social classes (no, really, it was all based on the socio-economic success these folks were capable of from birth, see?).

These Hindu fundamentalists are also keen to note that their predecessors' arbitrarily derived superstitions came the closest to the true age of the Earth without going over — Bob Barker is no doubt impressed. Never mind that with the ridiculous number of random silly beliefs throughout human history, some of them might end up resembling scientific fact by chance. Really. Never mind that. It upsets them.

We're sure the Discovery Institute and the Thomas More Law Center will be rushing to aid these heroic revisionists in their attempt to have that darned old controversy taught. What — no? Hey, where are you guys? The controversy needs to be taught! Right?