John Freshwater is going to trial

Remember the case of John Freshwater, the Ohio science teacher who burned a cross into a student’s arm and decorates his desk with Christian kitsch? He’s a raving mad loon, but he’s also fun and popular with the Christian kids at school (who are, naturally, a majority).

Now John Freshwater and the school district are going to court.

Freshwater’s action and the administration’s inaction, the lawsuit states, “have the purpose and effect of endorsing religion over non-religion and Christianity over other religious beliefs, thus violating the neutrality portion of the Establishment Clause.”

In addition to asking the court to issue an injunction against the teaching of religion in the school, the plaintiffs seek compensatory damages, punitive damages, reasonable attorney fees, prejudgment interest and post judgment costs, and other relief the court deems appropriate.

Read the whole thing. It sounds open-and-shut to me, since not only is Freshwater plainly promoting sectarian religion in the public school classroom, he’s proud of it and brags about his advocacy. One wild card, though: the plaintiffs want a jury trial. That isn’t always a plus in a case that’s trying to protect a minority view.

They’re also just asking that Freshwater stop peddling his sectarian nonsense in the classroom (plus damages and costs), so I don’t think he’ll get to achieve his desired martyrdom.

Also at FCA [Fellowship of Christian Athletes] meetings, the suit alleges that Freshwater distributed Bibles for the students present to give to other students at the school who were not present, and that an invited speaker told students “they should disobey the law to further their own religion, even if it means going to jail.”

Jail isn’t at stake here, nor are they asking that he be fired. Just please stop using the classroom as a pulpit.

Bobby Jindal, another clown in the body politic

Oh, my. Bobby Jindal was on TV, and he got asked about evolution. Here’s his answer to a question about whether he had doubts about evolution.

One, I don’t think this is something the federal or state government should be imposing its views on local school districts. You know, as a conservative I think government that’s closest to the people governs best. I think local school boards should be in a position of deciding the curricula and also deciding what students should be learning. Secondly, I don’t think students learn by us withholding information from them. Some want only to teach intelligent design, some only want to teach evolution. I think both views are wrong, as a parent.

One, that is an incredibly dumb answer. Devolving the responsibility for deciding science content onto a local school board is a horrible idea; has he never attended school board meetings? They are run by, at best, well-meaning people who care about local schools, but unless it’s a school district in a district with a university, you’re not likely to find any scientists on them. More typically, they’re going to contain a mix of very bad people: ideologues who want to shut down public schools, or push their unsupported nonsensical agenda, or the local cranks who’ve upgraded from writing letters to the editor of the town paper.

If he wanted to let the school board manage budgets, that’s one thing; unfortunately, thinking that a hodge-podge of random community members with few scientific qualifications are adequate to evaluate the science content is a classic instance of conservative idiocy. Standards must be determined at a higher level by a carefully chosen pool of competent, qualified experts.

Second, nobody is withholding information from students. Here, this is the complete curriculum for the intelligent design part of the syllabus:

A magic man done it.

There, finished! There are no experiments that need to be summarized, no details that need to be explored, no complicated mechanisms that need to be explicated. Parents can exhaustively cover the subject in a moment or two some evening, or perhaps Mom could could scribble it down on a note in her child’s lunch. If they’re ambitious, they could send them off to a Sunday School, which might be taxed by the sudden increase in difficulty over the usual pap they dispense, but they’ll cope, perhaps by dumbing it down a little more.

One thing is for sure, we shouldn’t marshal the resources of our public school to teach such trivia, nor should we dignify the vacuity of ID with a place in the curriculum when there is nothing to teach.

Jindal’s “ideas” are utterly ludicrous, nothing but the warmed over inanity of the Discovery Institute’s usual “teach the controversy” foolishness. This is a “Republican superstar”? Man, but that party has become a bucket of rejects and peckerwoods, hasn’t it?

We have our nuts up north, too

Minnesota pastor Gus Booth is using his pulpit to promote candidates for political office, claiming that “God wants me to address the great moral issues of the day”. Which is fine with me, even though I disagree with him on just about everything. He clearly wants to commit himself to crusading for his causes, even though (or because) he is an idiot.

How do I know that? Because he now wants to claim that he’s being persecuted by the IRS and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, since they argue that such political activity is a violation of the rules governing his church’s tax exemption. They are not saying he can’t speak out against abortion or for his dangerously loony political candidates, they are saying he can’t both speak out and demand the privilege of not paying taxes on his political headquarters. He doesn’t get it.

I think that if he wants to fight a god-mandated war, he ought to expect to make a few sacrifices in his struggle. It’s worth it, right?

The AU has put out a nice letter on the subject.

Obviously vice-presidential material…in America

I keep telling people there is a deep dangerous strain of insanity running through this country, and here’s a perfect example: Bobby Jindal.

We’ve discovered that in an essay Jindal wrote in 1994 for the New Oxford Review, a serious right-wing Catholic journal, Jindal narrated a bizarre story of a personal encounter with a demon, in which he participated in an exorcism with a group of college friends. And not only did they cast out the supernatural spirit that had possessed his friend, Jindal wrote that he believes that their ritual may well have cured her cancer.

Reading the article leaves no doubt that Jindal — who graduated from Brown University in 1991, was a Rhodes Scholar, and had been accepted at Yale Law School and Harvard Medical School when he wrote the essay — was completely serious about the encounter. He even said the experience “reaffirmed” his faith.

Jindal is considered a serious contender for the vice presidential nomination…or at least, he’s one of the people the media thinks will appeal to a broad swathe of the country, boosting John McCain’s presidential aspirations. He’s also the governor of Louisiana. How could you people down there elect this goony bird?

Pointless poll or serious survey?

I’m going to give you a choice today.

  • If you’ve only got a moment and want to click a button and be done with something fairly trivial, vote on whether to impeach Bush.

  • For a change, if you’ve got a half hour or so and would like to contribute data to serious research, take Elisabeth Cornwell’s research survey. I think we could add a large dollop of godless attitudes to her work.

(Hmmm…I should do a poll on who would rather crash a poll vs. take a serious survey!)

Good on you, Oklahoma!

Under the malign influence of the wicked and silly Sally Kern, some Oklahomans were trying to pass an awful religious viewpoints anti-discrimination act, which would have simply given further privileges to majority religious views in the state.

Fortunately, Governor Brad Henry has vetoed the legislation, saying

Under current state and federal law, Oklahoma public school students are already allowed to express their faith through voluntary prayer and other activities. While well intended, this legislation is vaguely written and may trigger a number of unintended consequences that actually impede rather than enhance such expression. For example, under this legislation, schools could be forced to provide equal time to fringe organizations that masquerade as religions and advocate behaviors, such as drug use or hate speech, that are dangerous or offensive to students and the general public. Additionally, the bill would presumably require school officials to determine what constitutes legitimate religious expression, subjecting them to an explosion of costly and protracted litigation that would have to be defended at taxpayers expense.

It’s one small step back from the brink of theocratic inanity, hooray!

Support El Tinklenberg!

Michele Bachmann is the Minnesota representative who embarrasses us all. She is, of course, a Republican, and one of the dumber ones — she’s our anti-gay, anti-science, anti-American, far-right-wing kook, and we need to get her out of office … she’s up for re-election this year.

My oldest son Alaric is an activist and organizer for the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party here in Minnesota, and he’s campaigning for the sensible opposition, El Tinklenberg. He’s asked me to promote an event going on TONIGHT, a fundraiser and rally for Tinklenberg in St Cloud. If you’re somewhere in the region, stop by. If maybe you aren’t a Minnesotan, but you’d like to help out financially (really — Bachmann is flaming insane, and the entire country ought to be interested in ousting her), call 320 217 5394 and chip in a few bucks (you might also find my boy on the other end of the phone line. Tell him hello from me.)

Here are the details on the big event.

Please Help Us
DEFEAT
Michele Bachmann

Cindy Harner, Rich Kelly
and
Rick Miller

Invite You to Come, Meet and Support

El Tinklenberg
Candidate for Congress in the 6th

Thursday, June 5
7:00 – 9:00 PM

Home of Rich Kelly:
524 7th Avenue South, St. Cloud
Co-hosts include:
Senator Tarryl Clark
Representative Larry Haws
Representative Larry Hosch
Candidate Joanne Dorsher
Candidate Rob Jacobs

Contribute What You Can!

ALL ARE WELCOME!

RSVP to Rick Miller 320-293-3935 rick@tinklenberg08.com

Work fast. I just got this notice myself, since my connection to the internet is only intermittent while I’m out of town.

Aetogate

Sometimes, the politics of science can get ugly, and they don’t get much uglier than this ghastly mess going on among paleontologists. I’ve read a couple of accounts of this story so far, and it sounds to this outsider like a few senior scientists riding roughshod over their junior colleagues and students and appropriating as their own the interpretations and details of others’ explanations. There seem to be shenanigans all over the place, and it seems to be in the interests of all parties involved to resolve the issues.

The sensible thing to do would be to have an impartial review of both sides of the story by neutral but knowledgeable observers — as a non-paleontologist, someone like me would certainly defer to the judgment of such a panel. Well, the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science put together a review, supposedly, and did so in such a bumbling, biased, and stupid way that although they decided there was no wrongdoing, I’m persuaded otherwise. Why else make such an effort to assemble a kangaroo court?

Spencer Lucas and his colleagues at the NMMNHS were accused of using the work of William Parker, Jerzy Dzik, and Jeff Martz without proper attribution. To judge this accusation, the NMMNHS put together a committee of external experts that consisted of people who had published with Lucas, one of whom declared his summary judgment before the hearings were held.

Unbelievable.

They’re accused of a serious impropriety, so they blatantly fix the review, packing the jury and even declaring innocence before the trial? That’s compounding a major ethical lapse on top of an accusation of an ethical lapse, and only makes the problem worse. What were they thinking?