Texas, you are a wonder. You don’t have any protections against workplace discrimination on the basis of sex or gender — that might hurt bidness, you know — but you’re considering a bill to protect creationists from discrimination.
Sec.A51.979.A A PROHIBITION OF DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RESEARCH RELATED TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN. An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member’s or student’s conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms.
I understand how discrimination rules work in employment: for instance, when we’re looking at job applications, we have to justify every rejection as well as our acceptance of the person we want to hire; when we develop a list of candidates we want to interview, it’s sent off to the administration for review. If we said we wanted to do phone interviews of six candidates, and all of them were men, they’d look at the applicant pool and tell us if we were somehow biased against women.
I’m wondering, though, how this one will work. Will a Texas biology program have to send their list to an administration that will scrutinize them and tell them they need to include more creationists in their interviews?
I would also like to see what kind of creationist “research” these faculty and students are thought to be doing. Sitting around reading a Bible isn’t science.
