I am pleased to see that some Australian scientists are taking a stand and telling their universities to stop peddling woo — alternative medicine classes that only train students to respect quackery. I’m looking at you, too, University of Minnesota: we have a “Center for Spirituality and Healing” that fills me with rage every time I consider it.

There’s also a poll! Charge in and let Australia know what you think. Oh, and if anyone sees a poll on giving UM’s supernatural quack center the axe, let me know.

How do you rate alternative medicine?

Prefer it to traditional medicine 14%

Use it with traditional medicine 24%

Open minded about it 12%

Believe it’s quackery 50%

After this incredibly petty story of blatant bigotry — florists in Cranston, RI, refuse to deliver flowers to an atheist girl’s house — the local journalists are so ethically compromised that they think they need to run a poll to determine whether discrimination is popular or not. Even if you disagree with Ahlquist, why would you think that open injustice is a commendable practice?

Which florist would you patronize?

Florists who refuse to deliver to Ahlquist: 30.1%

Florist who delivers to Ahlquist: 64.2%

Makes no difference: 5.7%

The same station that ran the interview with Peter Palumbo calling Jessica Ahlquist an “evil little thing” and has also called her a “trained seal”^* is now trying to salvage some vindication from the ugly affair with an internet poll. It isn’t working. JT and Twitter and Reddit have been pounding on it for a while, but I think we can take a moment to splatter it a little more.

Do you support the Judge’s decision to remove the Cranston Prayer Banner?

Yes 91%
No 9%

^*The person who made that comment was the author of the prayer…who, ironically, also claimed that at her age Ahlquist could not possibly be mature enough at 15 to have independently opposed the prayer. He wrote it when he was a 7th grader, about 13 years old.

Jessica Ahlquist won her court battle to have a prayer recognized as a prayer, but it looks like some people are itching to appeal the decision — they say that all that is holding them back is a lack of money. Hey, how about a lack of reasonable grounds to stand on?

Another poll whimpers in protest. Another poll is being ground into the dirt with the right answer.

Do you agree with the court’s decision?

Yes, the banner was unconstitutional. 80%

No, they shouldn’t have to take it down. 20%

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Oh, and take a look at what the gentle, moderate, liberal Christians are saying.

The decision that the prayer plastered on the wall of Jessica Ahlquist’s high school was, in fact, a religious prayer to a divine being, is now getting challenged in the most important venue of all — a newspaper’s online poll. The vote is currently split between people who can see the obvious, that that thing is a prayer, and the dumb and dishonest, who want to pretend that a “prayer” to a “heavenly father” is a secular document.

Which side are you on?

Did Judge Lagueux get it right in ordering the Cranston West prayer banner be removed?

Yes: 49.4%

No: 49.1%

Not sure: 1.5%

Huh. So some cranky anti-Watsonite scribbled up a petty screed against her on r/atheism, which is stupid and negligible, except then several people start complaining about the horrible Pharyngula people who just downvote everything right and good and manly.

There’s probably a large Pharyngula block vote around on /r/atheism; when the whole elevator shitstorm blew up, that whole crowd sided pretty solidly with Team Rebecca.

I had no idea! I’ve never even tried to dispatch a squadron of winged happy monkeys to reddit for such a thing! Without even lifting a finger, I’ve been skewing polls on reddit.

So here, let’s give it a shot. Go read the goofy thing (“Tl;dr Rebecca Watson is a bitch.”), make your own opinion about it, and vote it up or down. Right now, it has 87 points (70% like it). Go ahead, skew it one way or another — we’re going to get blamed anyway.

As long as we’re educating Washington state, here’s a poll on which they might appreciate getting our input.

Should gay marriage be legal in Washington state?

Yes 46.03%
No 53.97%

This is an awesomely badly worded poll — so awful I don’t even know how to vote.

Do you think Muslim prayers should be allowed in school?

Yes (61%)
No (39%)

For three years, hundreds of students have been praying in the cafeteria at Valley Park Middle School during their lunch hour. The school doesn’t run or pay for the service.

Reading that far, I would say yes, of course students should be allowed to pray. Doesn’t matter whether they’re Christian, Muslim, or Satanist — if they’re not being disruptive and just doing their own thing, let them do it.

But then there is this…

The service is operated by members of the Valley Park community

Huh? It’s a “service” that is “operated” by people in the community? That’s a whole different matter. If they’re bringing in priests of their cult and doing organized prayer sessions on the sufferance of the school administration, that’s too much — it would be disruptive, and it turns the school cafeteria into a church.

That’s why the poll sucks. This isn’t an issue about whether kids should be allowed to pray, it’s about whether schools should host religious services during school hours. And the answer there would be NO.

Except for the additional qualification that this is all in Canada, which doesn’t have the nominal separation of church and state that we do. Ethically, at least, the answer is still no — don’t use schools for religious indoctrination.