BARBARA FORREST knew the odds were stacked against her. “They had 50 or 60 people in the room,” she says. Her opponents included lobbyists, church leaders and a crowd of home-schooled children. “They were wearing stickers, clapping, cheering and standing in the aisles.” Those on Forrest’s side numbered less than a dozen, including two professors from Louisiana State University, representatives from the Louisiana Association of Educators and campaigners for the continued separation of church and state.
That was on 21 May, when Forrest testified in the Louisiana state legislature on the dangers hidden in the state’s proposed Science Education Act. …
The act is designed to slip ID in “through the back door”, says Forrest, who is a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and an expert in the history of creationism. She adds that the bill’s language, which names evolution along with global warming, the origins of life and human cloning as worthy of “open and objective discussion”, is an attempt to misrepresent evolution as scientifically controversial.
Forrest’s testimony notwithstanding, the bill was passed by the state’s legislature – by a majority of 94 to 3 in the House and by unanimous vote in the Senate. On 28 June, Louisiana’s Republican governor, Piyush “Bobby” Jindal, signed the bill into law. The development has national implications, not least because Jindal is rumored to be on Senator John McCain’s shortlist as a potential running mate in his bid for the presidency.
“New legal threat to school science in the US,” 09 July 2008, New Scientist, Amanda Gefter
I’ve written about this sort of thing several times before but these creationists, uh, intelligent design-ists, are the Energizer Bunny of radical Christian idiocy. It’s almost perfectly Orwellian: teachers are free to teach students non-science in the name of scientific objectivity.
I keep wondering at what point this sort of thing will create a common sense uprising. Why does any Christian want to compete with the schools, for one thing, or with science, for another? It seems to me that religions have much more effective methods of persuasion than the classroom.
