Texas has McLeroy driving pro-science people out of the Texas Education Agency, so Florida must be feeling left behind: a member of their state board of education has recently declared her opposition to evolution in the schools.

State Board of Education member Donna Callaway says she’ll be voting against the proposed new state science standards because evolution “should not be taught to the exclusion of other theories of origin of life” and says she hopes “there will be times of prayer throughout Christian homes and churches directed toward this issue.”

“As a SBOE member, I want those prayers,” Callaway said, according to a Nov. 30 column in the Florida Baptist Witness, a weekly newspaper based in Jacksonville that is an official organ of the Florida Baptist Convention. “I want God to be part of this. Isn’t that ironic?”

Florida Citizens for Science has been on top of this for some time. It’s completely incomprehensible to me: the court precedent is very clear that you don’t get to insert your sectarian religious beliefs into the public schools, yet these bizarre creationist uprisings always begin with some clueless, bleating official on a school board babbling about bringing back prayer and god and appealing for Christian support. I thought for a while we might have to seriously worry about a new DI strategy of more effectively divorcing themselves from religion, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards: they are whining about religious persecution in the Gonzalez tiff, and we can reliably trust their followers to bring out the sacred, holy knife of their blessed lord Jesus and publicly slit their own throats with it, guaranteeing that the case will never be seen as a secular issue.

So now I’m wondering which state is going to have the dubious privilege of hosting the next spectacular time-waster of court case. Texas is looking good, and that would be a nice place to drive a stake into the creationist movement, but Florida is coming on strong. There are also tales of a few smoldering possibilities in Louisiana. Or perhaps some dark horse crazy will come galloping out of one of the northern states and surprise us. We should start a pool.

Who best to talk about the Gonzalez tenure case? Since he’s an astronomer, how about another astronomer? Phil is unimpressed:

So when ISU denied Gonzalez tenure, I applauded them. Faculty members are de facto representatives of the University, and having one advocate for a provably wrong antiscientific load of crap… well, it seems counterproductive. Denying someone tenure on that basis alone is, in my opinion, perfectly valid, and in fact should be demanded.

It will feed their martyr complex a little more, but it’s true — when you’re trying to peddle weird pseudoscience and you don’t have the evidence to back it up, you don’t get to join the ranks of professional scientists.

And how about the opinion of someone who was there? Evil Monkey reports direct from Iowa, and he makes the point that Gonzalez’s grant record did not come close to that of his colleagues, and that’s counting an chunk of change straight from the Discovery Institute.

So Gonzalez brought in about 1/10th of the funds of his other colleagues, on average, at best. A good chunk of that went back to the University of Washington to pay a grad student, not ISU. The Templeton grant to write Privileged Planet would pay a portion of his salary, not fund research and advance the mission of his department. And the DI grant (having probably the most fortuitous timing I’ve ever seen) of $50k over 5 years won’t even pay a technician for two full years. The DI claims not much money is needed to do astronomy research, simply on a computer to crunch numbers (which is laughable as typically universities provide some computers to their professors). But somebody, be it a technician, a grad student, or a postdoc, has to be paid to collect data, which that requires salary, benefits, and ‘scope time. Obviously it does require serious cash, as his peers are pulling in over ten times the money Gonzalez is. By way of comparison, I coauthored a grant that netted $198,000 over the course of one year when I was a postdoc.

Poor Guillermo. What he should be doing is either writing grant proposals, or writing applications for jobs that have lesser requirements for bringing in external funds. Instead, he’s looking on as the DI digs a deep grave in which to bury his career.