Religious Right Watch

Crazy For Creationism: Legislators In Ind. And N.H. Seek To Undermine Instruction About Evolution

Rob Boston at Talk To Action:

It looks like opponents of creationism are going to have their hands full in 2012. The new year is just a few days old, and already we've seen several anti-evolution bills popping up in the states.

In Indiana, state Sen. Dennis Kruse has introduced S.B. 89, a bill that would allow public schools in the state to "require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation."

Kruse has been on this crusade for a number of years and has introduced versions of this bill before. They always died. But Republicans now control the state Senate, and Kruse is chairman of the Senate Education Committee. From this powerful perch, he can agitate for this misguided legislation.

There remains one huge problem with the bill: It is patently unconstitutional. As Genie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, told the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette,  Kruse's bill would run afoul of Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Louisiana law requiring "balanced treatment" between creation science and evolution.

"The law is very, very clear on this," Scott said. "If this bill is passed, it is going to be challenged, and they will lose. The case law is so strong against them."

Meanwhile, some New Hampshire legislators have introduced a pair of truly kooky bills. State Rep. Jerry Bergevin's bill, H.B. 1148, would order the state board of education to "[r]equire evolution to be taught in the public schools of this state as a theory, including the theorists' political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism."

via www.talk2action.org

U.S. Military Teaches Foreign Students That Liberals Subverted America's Judeo-Christian Heritage | from Talk To Action

There's a program in the military called the International Military Student Officer (IMSO) program. This program is run by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, and exists in all branches of the military. But, while this program is run by the military, the Secretary of State is responsible for its "continuous supervision and general direction."

The IMSO program includes military training (particularly the training of foreign military personnel on equipment acquired by their countries from the United States) as well as instruction in such things as foreign policy, civil affairs, and security. Another of its core missions is to "Promote better understanding of the United States, its people, political system, institutions, democratic values, and way of life." To fulfill this mission, the program also includes intensive instruction on American government and culture....

Foreign military students are taught that America is a Christian nation, and that liberals, starting with the liberal justices appointed by F.D.R., have subverted America's so-called judeo-christian heritage, and how the "courts struggle with ... accommodation of atheists demanding religion be kept out of public life."

These are the last three paragraphs of a lengthy essay on American religion in the "American Family Life and Community Life: Religious Institutions" section of the IMSO training:

via www.talk2action.org

Poll: Americans Believe Big Gov't Messes With God's Plan, Christian News

 

A new study shows that a majority of Americans believe God is the guiding force that is leading America's economy and the government is too big. As a result, sociologists concluded these believers are upset about U.S. economic policy because they believe increased government regulation and interference in personal freedoms go against God's plans.

 

• (Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

via www.christianpost.com

Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact

[Darwin's Theory of Evolution by National Selection] is a good theory because of the huge ratio of what it explains (all the complexity of life) divided by what it needs to assume (simply the nonrandom survival of hereditary information through many generations). The rival theory to explain the functional complexity of life - creationism - is about as bad a theory as has ever been proposed. What it postulates (an intelligent designer) is even more complex, even more statistically improbable than what it explains. In fact it is such a bad theory it doesn’t deserve to be called a theory at all, and it certainly doesn’t deserve to be taught alongside evolution in science classes.

via citizenship.typepad.com

Doonesbury on Creationism

Hat-tip to AU on Facebook. (Click to enlarge the image; but, the whole thing's here--Doonesbury's 7/10 strip.)

 

Historical Ignorance Warps American Politics: Jonathan Alter

Bachmann, like Palin, is a natural dog whistler. In politics, a dog whistle refers to a coded message meant to appeal to certain constituencies while flying right past the general public. A classic recent example was George W. Bush’s saying in a 2004 debate that he wouldn’t appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who supported the Dred Scott decision. This peculiar reference to an 1857 slavery case was meant to signal right-to-lifers that opposition to Roe v. Wade was a litmus test for Bush.

Bachmann is dog whistling when she pledges to “take back America.” The question this raises is: from whom? From a “socialist” president?

Let’s give Bachmann the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that no racial message was intended. A subliminal racial message, among others, will still likely be received. “Take back America” is also a dog whistle for “Take America back” -- back to a better time before a man like Barack Obama was president. Before, say, the number of Hispanics taking the national history assessment test in eighth-grade more than doubled in a mere five years.

via www.bloomberg.com

And about Bachmann's reading of Gore Vidal's historical novels:

Bachmann's simplistic view of Vidal's novels (she's cited both 1876 and Burr, only one of which has to do with our Founding Fathers) reveals her mindset--folks are big on the not-new but once-academic term "worldview" these days. It is a mindset that that also allows her to be comforted in her pre-scientific conservative evangelical religiosity. She hadn't the sense or ability to read an imaginary first-person narrative as being subjective, even purposefully untrustworthy through the novelist's craft. (An elderly Aaron Burr provides that perspective in Burr, Charles Schuyler in 1876, and both characters are clearly flawed, each a mix informed insight but also bias.) It's Literature 101 kind of stuff, and she didn't even get it.

Epistemological fundamentalism doesn't mesh as well with subtly, diversity, or compromise as it does with literalism, pigeon-holing, and inflexibility. It's mindset as the electrician's comparator--a reality with only two modes on offer and completely committed to either one or the other. Such black-and-white thinking is not suited to the job of head of state of our republic in a complex global era.

Falwell's Liberty University Raking in Big-Time Money From America's Taxpayers

In the past, Liberty University was saved from debt by being a beneficiary of the late Jerry Falwell's life insurance policy. It has also been bailed out by the financial maneuverings of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. These days, however, the university is experiencing phenomenal growth, due in part to the largesse of the American taxpayer.

via www.talk2action.org

Liberty University is now the nation's 8th largest university and largest private four-year, non-profit university in the U.S.

Biblical Expert: Faith-Based Anti-Marriage Arguments Empty | EDGE

Dudley told the newspaper, religious denunciations of marriage equality are based less on the Word of God than on the self-interest of those who promote faith-based legal and social inequality.

"The community of evangelical biblical scholars, almost exclusively white heterosexual men, has a history of producing interpretations of the Bible that reflects its own interests and disadvantages those without power," the scholar noted.

"The same leaders that insist on the most rigorous, stringent reading possible on homosexuality come up with all sorts of nuances and complicating considerations to justify leniency for themselves when it comes to more obvious biblical condemnations of divorce. So, why is it that same-sex relationships don’t get the same treatment?"

via www.edgeonthenet.com

If what the Bible says affects your justification for or against marriage equality, you might find Mr. Dudley's questions relevant for you. However, to even more people, they are going to be at least interesting. Dudley's book, Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics, is available online.

GOP hopefuls court evangelical support

[Ralph] Reed says that if there has been any political shift among evangelicals, it will turn out to be nothing more than a youthful flirtation.

“The Grand Canyon that runs through the electorate demographically is ultimately not a profession of faith,” he said. “It’s behavioral. Once they are married, once they have children and once they are going to church weekly, it’s game, set, match.”

via news.yahoo.com

This article gets to the heart of the matter only towards the end: the conservative evangelical vote is very strong for the foreseeable future. Young evangelicals having voted for Obama is not in and of itself a compelling indication of any significant tendency among most evangelicals of any age being likely to support candidates, especially Democratic ones, commited to, say, marriage equality or upholding strong education that includes basic scientific realities like deep time or evolution through natural selection.

In the wake of the repeal effort | NCSE

The attempt to repeal Louisiana's antievolution law was discussed by the Christian Science Monitor (June 2, 2011), which explained, "The Louisiana Science Education Act, which allows teaching contrary to science on the grounds it promotes critical thinking, is increasingly serving as an inspiration to religious conservatives in other states." Antievolution bills were introduced in Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas so far in 2011, all dying except in Tennessee, where a bill was passed by the House of Representatives; and its counterpart is on hold in the Senate until 2012.

Meanwhile, Louisiana's Senate Bill 70, which would have repealed the state's antievolution law, was shelved on a 5-1 vote by the Senate Education Committee on May 26, 2011, despite the wide support for it from the scientific and educational communities — including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Louisiana Science Teachers Association, and forty-three Nobel laureate scientists. Harold Kroto, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996, was quoted as comparing a vote against the repeal to "requiring Louisiana school texts to include the claim that the Sun goes round the Earth."

via ncse.com

And done in the name of critical thinking no less. 

As Quinn O'Neill noted in his recent post on 3quarksdaily:

[E]volution doesn’t just change the way we look at things, it’s necessary for making sense of much of science. Major science organizations have acknowledged this vital role. The American Association for the Advancement of Science states:

"The modern concept of evolution provides a unifying principle for understanding the history of life on earth, relationships among all living things, and the dependence of life on the physical environment. While it is still far from clear how evolution works in every detail, the concept is so well established that it provides a framework for organizing most of the biological knowledge into a coherent picture."

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has echoed this sentiment, noting that evolutionary theory “has become the central unifying concept of biology and is a critical component of many related scientific disciplines.” What level of science literacy can we expect students to achieve without a solid understanding of such a fundamental and unifying concept?

Teaching science matters.