Was Sen. Joe McCarthy just misunderstood?

In an interview with the Anniston Star, State Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, says that McCarthy was right in his efforts to flush out communists, and he thinks it's inappropriate for Alabama high school students to read The Crucible because a sidebar in a textbook explains the parallels between the Arthur Miller play and the Red Scare.

"So we're comparing the McCarthy investigations of the 1950s, in which he turned out to be right, with the Salem witch hunts," Beason said.

The Crucible as a metaphor for McCarthy's communist witch hunts is not merely an inference by academics. The playwright said explicitly that is what the play is about.

The Crucible is one of many texts included in a high school literature textbook, "American Experience 1900 to Present," that Beason and others have pilloried in their fight against Common Core standards in Alabama schools.

Beason, who is running for Congress in Alabama's 6th District, has said that Common Core attempts to infuse the minds of school children with socialism, and he believes that Alabama curriculum should emphasize traditional conservative values. He has sponsored a bill in the Alabama Legislature to repeal the standards in Alabama schools.

"I want a conservative, honest, traditional, American values worldview, yes," he said in an interview in January. "Education has always been about worldview. I don't think anyone can disagree with that. Always has been. I think the left understands the power of education far more than the right."

Beason also takes issue with other passages from the textbook, including works by naturalist John Muir, poet Randall Jarrell and author Tim O'Brien.

O'Brien has written extensively about his experience as a Vietnam veteran. Beason says O'Brien's portrayal of that war casts the United States's role there in a bad light.

"What is the message that's being put across?" Beason told the Anniston Star. "Is it that we were the bad guys in Vietnam, or was it that we were the good guys in Vietnam? I think we're the good guys. But I don't get that out of this argument, I mean, of this story."

Beason first gained national attention when, while cooperating with a federal corruption investigation in Montgomery, he recorded himself joking about African-Americans in Greene County with another lawmaker and referring to them as "aborigines."

But Beason is not alone in his sympathy for McCarthy. Another Common Core opponent interviewed by the Anniston Star, Talladega County Republican Party Chairman Danny Hubbard, also said McCarthy was right. While Hubbard objected to many texts offered as "exemplars" by Common Core, he did not take issue with one written by an Alabama native.

"I don't think anybody's opposed to 'To Kill a Mockingbird,'" Hubbard said. "It's a classic. I believe it's written by a fellow from Montgomery."

In fact, the book was written by Nelle Harper Lee. She's from Monroeville.

You can read Anniston Star reporter Tim Lockette's full story on the Common Core fight here.