A Republican Wyoming state legislator wants schools to teach “different views” about slavery, claiming that the current viewpoint of slavery has “stuck” some Americans in a mindset “worse than slavery itself,” the Casper Star Tribune writes.

Jeremy Haroldson, a first-term Republican representative from Wheatland, argued during a state house debate that lessons about slavery being a bad thing in American history may be unjust to the practice, which he acknowledged, “Slavery was something that shouldn’t have happened in America, but it did.

“But we’ve created slavery into a place that has created a position of being stuck, in my opinion, for a people group,” Haroldson, a pastor, continued.  “And that’s a sad place to be. And that was probably, in my opinion, worse than the slavery itself, because we have created a place where people cannot get free from because of their past.”

But, Haroldson said, slavery needs to be taught not just as a crime against humanity, but as an to the United States that helped build the nation. “It needs to be brought forward and the different views, that slavery was not maybe what it has been painted in this nation completely.”

Haroldson, noted for not being the sharpest knife in the drawer for doing things like comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust, said curriculum is “very much tilting more towards a liberal view of education.”  He proposed the “Education-Understanding Federal and State Government” bill which would mandate the teach of the Constitution in Wyoming schools–which is already required–as well as blocking instruction on “threats encountered by the democratic republic and free society,” like identity politics, corruption in government and religious discrimination.

“I don’t believe that [students are] getting a fully well-rounded view of the founding of this nation,” Haroldson said, citing his experience dealing with teens who have learned little about the Constitution in schools.

A fellow committee member questioned Haroldson’s own knowledge of the Constitution, asking him if he knew what the 19th Amendment of the Constitution stated, because it was not one of the points advocated in the bill.

“I would have to look at it right now ma’am,” he responded.

“It’s the right to vote for women,” Cathy Connolly, a Democrat from Laramie, said. “And it’s not included in your bill. So I’m curious about that.”

The bill failed to pass out of committee by a 7-2 vote.