Last Wednesday, Texas State Rep. Debbie Riddle (R) posted an angry rant on her Facebook page, declaring that “[o]ur soldiers do NOT need to be taught how to be sensitive to radical Muslims. They do not need to be worried about blowing their nose wrong or using their left hand and offending someone.” In response to this rant, a Muslim American law student named Abdul Pasha posted a link to a news report from a conservative news outlet explaining that a recent Defense Department study did indeed recommend that U.S. servicemembers receive training, not to teach them how to blow their nose, but instead to avoid certain behaviors that have led Afghan security forces to attack Americans.

Riddle did not take kindly to Pasha’s attempt to inject facts into the discussion. Most notably, Riddle told Pasha, who is as American as she is, that if he wants to be an American he should “act like one,” and suggested that he relocate to Afghanistan:

This kind of behavior is not atypical for Debbie Riddle. The Texas lawmaker sponsored a copycat bill emulating Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070 law, and she once claimed that pregnant women are coming into the United States to have American citizen babies then returning home “with the nefarious purpose of turning them into little terrorists, who will then come back to the U.S. and do us harm.”

On her Facebook page last week, Texas State Rep. Debbie Riddle (R-Tomball) explained her view that schools would be acting wisely and constitutionally if they start forcing students to read Christian Proverbs:

Formal prayer has been taken out of our schools. How about this idea? Read from the book of Proverbs from the Bible. Proverbs is a book of wisdom. Proverbs is in the Holy Scriptures for Christians and Jews. As for other religions – the wisdom won’t do them any harm…I say have a reading out of Proverbs each day in our classrooms.

Riddle’s suggestion that forcing students to listen to Christian proverbs is constitutional is wrong. The Supreme Court held that both school-led prayer and scripture readings are unconstitutional over forty years ago because the First Amendment prohibits public schools from promoting one religion over another or over no religion at all. Though Riddle claims the Book of Proverbs is a neutral “book of Wisdom,” she later admits that the reading of the proverbs is a Christian text which “won’t harm” people of “other religions.”

This is not the first time that Riddle’s ideas have been riddled with flaws. In 2010, Riddle claimed that pregnant women were coming to the United States to have babies “with the nefarious purpose of turning them into little terrorists, who will then come back to the U.S. and do us harm.” With no facts to back her up “terrorist babies” claim, Riddle became a symbol of completely unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories.

– Ben Sherman