Religious Right Watch

Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the right: “Cosmos,” Christians, and the battle for American science - Salon.com

The religious right has been freaking out about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos” for what feels like an eternity. And, while the theological complaints seem laughable for their rancor and predictability, it’s time we thought harder about what they represent, because the Christian right’s “Cosmos” agita actually indicates a far deeper problem in religious conservatism — the selective acceptance of Enlightenment values. Religious conservatives have selectively adopted the legacy of liberal Enlightenment, from free speech to science, and jettisoned it when it does not suit their narrow ideological aims.

via www.salon.com

God Loves Uganda shows how American conservative evangelicals are exporting homophobia to Africa

"God Loves Uganda, which was broadcast earlier this week on PBS and is now available on iTunes and Netflix." 

The documentary shows how not only prominent American conservative evangelicals like Scott Lively and Lou Engle but many missionaries and organizations like the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer 

have done a great job convincing Ugandan parents that homosexuals are out to get their children. This “recruiting” notion is as old as time and should have been discredited by now, but it seems to work particularly well in a culture that has not had much experience with sexual minorities. Of course, the irony is that it’s the radical evangelicals who are doing the recruiting here, literally whispering their lifestyle into the ears of kids—as a poignant scene at the funeral of slain activist David Kato shows, actual LGBTQ people are struggling just to stay alive.

via www.slate.com

View the trailer of God Loves Uganda and visit the documentary's website.

On Twitter, look for the hashtags #UgandaNews #UgandaLGBT, and follow the documentary God Loves Uganda on Twitter--handle: @GodLovesUganda.

The documentary was released on DVD on May 19, 2014. It was directed by Oscar-winner @RogerRossWill.

How you can help.

The Gathering: The Religious Right’s Cash Cow | TWO Care

Bruce Wilson writes about The Gathering, which provides millions of dollars to religious-right causes.

Like its familial evangelical parent The Family, The Gathering takes the coercive moral authoritarianism inherent to anti-LGBT laws being passed (aided and encouraged by The Gathering-funded groups) from Uganda to Russia, and fuses it to the radical economic libertarianism of the Koch brothers....
.....
[The Gathering] have bankrolled, from Uganda to Russia, the mounting international war on LGBT rights; evangelical opposition to healthcare reform and action to curb climate change; the promotion of young-earth creationism and Intelligent Design; ministries training African leaders in the “biblical worldview”; legal efforts that have fought against same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in the United States, and have forced anti-gay fundamentalist bible clubs into thousands of U.S. public schools....

Its foundation heads are plaintiffs in a legal challenge to healthcare reform now before the U.S. Supreme Court and they are leading efforts to attack organized labor and defund public schools.

The colossus of The Gathering is the National Christian Foundation, which gave out an estimated $670 million dollars in grants in 2013 and has rocketed, in just two years, from spot number 34 to number 12 on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Philanthropy 400” list.

via www.twocare.org

Southern Baptist Leader Takes Religious Liberty Arguments to the Absurd | Political Research Associates

From Frederick Clarkson's article for Political Research Associates' Eyes Right:

There is much we can learn about the state of the Christian Right from Russell Moore, the point man on public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Like other Christian Right leaders, Moore continues to rely on historical revisionism, bogus science, dubious claims of religious persecution, and hints darkly of tyrannical governmental violence to come. But his arguments in favor of discrimination quickly drift into outright absurdity.
.....
[I]t is worth recalling that Moore, as we reported here at Eyes Right, recently distinguished himself by featuring two controversial and ethically compromised figures at a SBC “summit” on the Gospel and sexuality: Mark Regnerus, who is best known for his thoroughly debunked study on same-sex parenting (a study bankrolled by Christian Right interests opposed to gay parenting–a fact he attempted to conceal); and Greg Belser, who has been deeply implicated in the cover-up of a notorious child sex scandal among Baptist clergy. The two appeared on a panel on homosexuality at the Summit along with Baptist pastor J.D. Greear, who sparked a storm on social media when he compared opposing marriage equality in the church to opposing slavery in the South at the beginning of the Civil War. Moore is planning an entire conference on homosexuality slated for October 2014.

Read the article at www.politicalresearch.org

(Photo: Russell Moore)

"The Missionary Supposition": evolution education doesn't work

In a recent Reports of the National Center for Science Education (PDF), historian Adam Laats, author of Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America's Culture Wars (2010), writes about the necessity of science educators to understand Creationist culture.

Americans do not get it. Nearly half of US adults believe that humans were created as is, less than 10,000 years ago (Newport 2012). Those of us who care about evolution education must confront a sobering truth: evolution education does not work. Yet since long before the days of John Scopes, most of us have simply offered more of the same.

Laats says that evolution education fails to convince creationists.

Granted, the special purpose of evolution education is not to convince creationists. Evolution education in general succeed with many students as it should. If a student is objective and intellectually curious, they will learn evolution's principles and contemplate the theory's implications, and perhaps if they do not start down a path towards a profession in the sciences, then they may--more probably--remain curious about the new discoveries and developments in the field as they encounter it in future years through popular science writing and documentaries.

But for this education to be utterly ineffective fro such a huge percentage of Americans is a significant problem.

Laat proposes that evolution science educators need to better understand creationist culture, because evidence of evolution isn't sufficient to convince creationists.

Evolution education should never become an exercise in religious conversion, but it is high time for scientists and teachers to notice that not even religious missionaries engage in the naive and blinkered missionary approach still so common among evolution educators.

In particular, Laat stresses rightly that too many evolution educators assume creationists are ignorant about evolution; in fact, they often are not. They simply reject the evidence.

Read the article here: Reports of the National Center for Science Education (PDF), pages 3–6.

Here's The Simple Reason Why The Religious Right Isn't Finished - Forbes

In other words, while it is losing a big battle (same sex marriage), the Religious Right still hasn’t lost its most important one (abortion) and on a host of other fronts (heterosexual marriage, inequality, criminal justice, religion in the public square), it is having to reconfigure in more productive ways–in ways that are more “seamless garment”, to use a Catholic expression. This is all to the good. Under a microscope, reform can look like defeat. But at the scale of history, things often end up very different.

via www.forbes.com

Creationism in public schools, mapped. Where tax money supports alternatives to evolution.

Thousands of schools in states across the country can use taxpayer money to cast doubt on basic science.

By Chris Kirk

A large, publicly funded charter school system in Texas is teaching creationism to its students, Zack Kopplin recently reported in Slate. Creationist teachers don’t even need to be sneaky about it—the Texas state science education standards, as well as recent laws in Louisiana and Tennessee, permit public school teachers to teach “alternatives” to evolution. Meanwhile, in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, taxpayer money is funding creationist private schools through state tuition voucher or scholarship programs.

To see the full 50-state map, go to: www.slate.com

via www.blogfordarwin.com

Poll: Republican Belief In Evolution Has Plummeted In Recent Years

Belief in evolution among Republicans has dropped more than 10 percentage points since 2009, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.

Pew found that 43 percent of Republicans said they believed humans and other living beings had evolved over time, down from 54 percent in 2009. More (48 percent) said they believed all living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.

The percentages for Democrats and independents were considerably more stable: Democratic belief in evolution went from 64 percent in 2009 to 67 percent in 2013; independent belief dipped from 67 percent in 2009 to 65 percent in 2013.

Among all American adults, 60 percent said they believe in evolution, according to Pew, and 33 percent do not.

The poll surveyed 1,983 Americans ages 18 and older from March 21 to April 8.

via talkingpointsmemo.com

There is only one scientific explanation for how species originate. It's called the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. It's not a theory in the everyday and conversational sense of the word theory--i.e. a guess--but a theory in the formal scientific meaning of the term: a concept larger than the sum of its parts, one that incorporates various scientific laws, observations, and facts into a more unified whole and that has been verified by subsequent findings and research, like with the germ theory of disease, the theories of special and general relativity, the theory of plate tectonics, and the theory of a heliocentric solar system.

To not "believe" in evolution--as is the case with a shockingly large number of conservative religious adherents in the U.S.A. and majority-Muslim countries--is like not believing that the Earth orbits the sun or not believing in oxygen or x-ray radiation. Especially since the modern evolutionary synthesis of the 1930's that integrated genetics into evolution, thereby revealing the means of heredity--which is something evolution's main discoverer, Charles Darwin, did not know--evolution has become an increasingly important and dynamic topic of research and tool for understanding how species evolve. To not believe in it is to walk away from a rich and amazing reality about we scientists are discovering more and making interesting refinements and corrections to those discoveries on an daily basis.

Image: click to enlarge - (via Wikipedia) "A highly resolved Tree Of Life, based on completely sequenced genomes."

Blog For Darwin: Popular Science ends reader comments; says practice is bad for science - Yahoo News

In a surprising move, the website for Popular Science announced they are no longer allowing reader comments on their articles. And in a potentially even more controversial move, the site’s online content director boldly explains the decision was reached because of their belief that reader’s comments are actually bad for science.

“A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics,” writes Suzanne LaBarre. “Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to ‘debate’ on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.”

via news.yahoo.com

via www.blogfordarwin.com

Defending Science Education in TX #StandUp4Science with Texas Freedom Network (TFN)

Texas Conservatives Demand Science Textbooks Incorporate 'Creation Science Based On Biblical Principles'.... Brian Tashmanof PFAW's project Right Wing Watch reports that: 

Creationists advising the Texas Education Agency, the state’s board of education, are no longer even trying to hide the fact that they want to insert pseudo-scientific material grounded in religious beliefs into public school science textbooks. Terrence Stutz of the Dallas Morning News reports that evolution detractors appointed to the review boards are urging the textbook publishers to ignore the Supreme Court (along with science) and push Creationism, or be rejected.

See also The Dallas Morning News article, "Religious conservatives on Texas textbook review panels criticize proposed science books".

A response to this religious-right ploy comes from the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) and its Stand Up for Science Education campaign (the hashtag is #standup4science). TFN explains:

Stand Up for Science is an ongoing TFN campaign uniting parents, educators, scientists and businesspeople in support of sound science education and responsible medical research in Texas. This multi-issue campaign focuses primarily on the issue of teaching evolution and climate change in public school science classes and defending stem cell research in Texas.

You can join our campaign by signing our Stand Up for Science petition. TFN will send e-mail updates to help you know when and how to take action on crucial public policy decisions involving science.

The TFN is live-blogging the hearing; the NCSE is live-tweeting #StandUp4Science also -- check it out.

(Image from TFN's #StandUp4Science Tumblr page.)