Don’t even think of mentioning the E word, if you are a Texas science teacher or educator, because even forwarding an email that merely includes the word “Evolution” can be hazardous to your career. You think I’m kidding? Then you haven’t seen this story, yet:
A Texas science education official forced to resign in October wasn’t — as her bosses inisted — fairly punished for insubordination. Her real crime: daring to tell people about a lecture critical of intelligent design.
The Austin-American Statesman reported last week that science curriculum director Chris Comer’s ouster followed her circulation of an email announcing an upcoming speech by Barbara Forrest, co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design and an expert witness in Kitzmiller v. Dover. . . .
Hours after Comer used her work email account to forward the Forrest announcement to friends and a few online communities, Texas Education Agency adviser Lizzette Reynolds emailed Comer’s bosses and called for her dismissal. A former legislative adviser to President Bush during his Texas governorship and later a Department of Education appointee, Reynolds wrote, “This is highly inappropriate. I believe this is an offense that calls for termination or, at the very least, reassignment of responsibilities. This is something that the State Board, the Governor’s Office and members of the Legislature would be extremely upset to see because it assumes this is a subject that the agency supports.”
If merely forwarding an email about an upcoming speaker on the issue of evolution versus “intelligent design” theory gets you shitcanned in Texas, imagine what would have happened if poor Ms. Comer had had the audacity to suggest that she herself accepted the validity of the theory of evolution? Tarred and feathered, or burned at the stake for heresy? You tell me.
And it’s no surprise a Bush appointee was the person behind this outrageous decision. As the Austin-American Statesman declared in its editorial about this case, firing someone for even mentioning that intelligent design and/or creationism have “critics” smacks of Soviet era purges. Or of the Catholic Church in the 17th century suppressing Galileo’s writings about the science that supported the “theory” that the earth orbited the sun and not vice versa. In short, it’s absurd.
Yet that is what the most extreme Christian conservatives would have us become: A nation of ignoramuses, blind to any truth other than that “revealed” by scripture as (presumably) interpreted by our designated “Spiritual Leaders.” That teachers were fired in the early 20th century for teaching evolution was understandable, if incredibly shortsighted, bigoted and stupid. That we are still having these debates at the beginning of the 21st century with all we have learned since the Scopes Monkey trial which supports the theory of evolution boggles my imagination.
This, as outrageous as it is, doesn’t surprise me one bit. Spooky! Very spooky!
I’ve come to believe lessons must be relearned in every generation. No learning is truly passed on from one generation to the next.
How many people here on this blog never heard of the CIA’s abuses, which came out in the 1970s?
The real question is: how many times can my head asplode?
This is disgusting. Chip, chip, chip goes the mallet and chisel on the shell of what remains of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights within the fortified borders of this country.
Interestingly enough, we voted an education agency member off the island tonight.
There are fewer biologists who question evolution than meteorologists who question global warming, and this really isn’t even characteristic of Texas. But it is characteristic of the idiots who have been placed in thousands of power positions (everywhere from academia to the military) during the Bush administration. Since most of them are actually “employees” rather than political appointees, it is going to take decades to weed them out based on incompetence.
Gotta disagree. This is absolutely classic Texas. We are probably the only state wherein comedians and critics are able to build entire careers of national renown merely by documenting (Not satirising, that’s not even POSSIBLE) state government.
Molly was right: The National Laboratory For Bad Government, where bad ideas go to live forever as policy.
Texas – the new Kansas!!!!
(In all fairness to my friends south of the Nebraska border, they have at least reversed their theocratic ways as far as the Kansas state board of education is concerned. The people spoke and tossed out the nuttier board members.)
Then there’s Florida where they have never taught evolution and finally just passed a law apparently where it has to be taught also and of course the religious crazies are out protesting how evil this is. One line of their reasoning being that if this is to be taught then the school system is calling all the parents who teach their kids the bible is real are all a bunch of liars thus undermining parents right to teach kids what is right…etc etc.
There’s a reason why a new worldwide study came out that shows kids in the US rank 29th in science…imagine that.