rescinds

OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma’s new public schools superintendent announced Wednesday he is rescinding a mandate from his predecessor that forced schools to incorporate the Bible into lesson plans for students.

Superintendent Lindel Fields said in a statement he has “no plans to distribute Bibles or a Biblical character education curriculum in classrooms.” The directive last year from former Superintendent Ryan Walters drew immediate condemnation from civil rights groups and prompted a lawsuit from a group of parents, teachers and religious leaders that is pending before the Oklahoma Supreme Court. It was to have applied to students in grades 5 through 12.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed Fields to the superintendent’s post after Walters resigned last month to take a job in the private sector.

Jacki Phelps, an attorney for the Oklahoma State Department of Education, said she intends to notify the court of the agency’s plan to rescind the mandate and seek a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Many schools districts across the state had decided not to comply with the Bible mandate.

A spokeswoman for the state education department, Tara Thompson, said Fields believes the decision on whether the Bible should be incorporated into classroom instruction is one best left up to individual districts and that spending money on Bibles is not the best use of taxpayer resources.

Walters in March had announced plans to team up with country music singer Lee Greenwood seeking donations to get Bibles into classrooms after a legislative panel rejected his $3 million request to fund the effort. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the Bible mandate did not immediately comment.

Walters, a far-right Republican, made fighting “woke ideology”, banning certain books from school libraries and getting rid of “radical leftists” who he claims were indoctrinating children in classrooms a focal point of his administration. Since his election in 2020, he imposed a number of mandates on public schools and worked to develop new social studies standards for K-12 public school students that included teaching about conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election. Those standards have been put on hold while a lawsuit challenging them moves forward.

Thompson said the agency plans to review all of Walters’ mandates, including a requirement that applicants from teacher jobs coming from California and New York take an ideology exam, to determine if those may also be rescinded.

“We need to review all of those mandates and provide clarity to schools moving forward,” she said.

Murphy writes for the Associated Press.

Sept. 29 (UPI) — The Trump administration on Monday rescinded a Biden-era firearms export rule that prohibited the transfer of civilian weaponry to individuals in 36 countries deemed high-risk of falling into the hands of criminals or terrorists.

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security rescinded the interim final rule, arguing it imposed “onerous” export controls on weapons, throttling U.S. gunmakers from competing in overseas markets at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in exports.

“BIS strongly rejects the Biden administration’s war on the Second Amendment and law-abiding firearms users,” Jeffrey Kessler, under secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, said in a statement.

“With today’s rule, BIS is restoring common sense to export controls and doing right by America’s proud firearms industry, while also continuing to protect national security.”

The Biden administration released the interim final rule in April 30, 2024, to restrict private transfers of firearms out of the United States.

It aimed to reduce so-called straw purchases where one person legally buys the weapon for someone restricted by the United States from owning it.

It did this by barring the sale of weapons to individuals in 36 countries the Department of State has designated a “substantial risk” that lawful firearms exports to non-governmental entities will be diverted or misused, according to a report to Congress on Biden-era restrictions on firearms sales.

The countries are those blacklisted in the State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices and the Presidential Determination on Major Drug Transit or Major Illicit Drug Producing Countries.

Countries on those lists include Afghanistan, Myanmar, China, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Jamaica and others.

The rule also reduced export license limits to one to two years instead of the previous four to five and required potential exporters to include purchase orders and passport identification from the intended recipient to show they are the actual person who is interested in and allowed to receive the firearm.

Civilian weapons and ammunition affected by the rule included most pistols, rifles, and non-long barrel shotguns.

In rescinding the rule, the Bureau of Industry and Security argued the presumption of denial to 36 countries ceded the overseas markets in those nations to foreign firearms manufactures, the export license requirements were a bureaucratic hurdle about optics, not national security.

“The firearm industry is tremendously grateful to the Trump administration and BIS officials for their actions to restore American competitiveness in firearm manufacturing and exports to foreign countries,” Lawrence Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel, said in a statement.

“American firearm manufacturing is the worldwide leader and removing these restrictions will restore access to foreign markets while continuing to maintain adequate export controls to prevent illegal firearm trafficking.”

A report produced in October 2024 by the Government Accountability Office found that 73% of all weapons, mostly handguns, recovered in crimes by law enforcement in Caribbean nations, which account for six of the 10 highest murder rates in the world, had come from the United States, many coming from commercial sales.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chastised the Trump administration for further weakening oversight of international arms transfers, saying these weapons will now more easily find their ways into “illicit hands.”

“Countries around the world, especially in Latin American and the Caribbean, have called on the U.S. to better control the export of American firearms, which all too often are exploited by gangs and criminal networks to destabilize communities and exacerbate civilian insecurity,” he said in a statement, while pointing to the GAO report.

“The administration’s reduction of oversight checks on such sales does nothing to strengthen national, regional or global security.”