Some clown at one of the ID blogs is making an incredibly stupid argument. She is claiming that my statement that I would not vote to give tenure to someone incompetent enough to support Intelligent Design creationism as a science is a violation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991 because, as Judge Jones has ruled, ID is founded on a specific religious view. She seems to think that demanding some standards in the review process is equivalent to excluding all religious people…which has some interesting implications. She must assume that the level of idiocy we see in the creationist crowd is implicit in all religious beliefs, and that religious people are incapable of teaching or research without babbling nonsense. She has an even more jaundiced view of the religious than I do!
Her claim, if valid, would mean that we could teach any ol’ belief we wanted in the classroom, and as long as we said it was part of our religion (or was so ludicrously absurd that the only possible justification for it is that it was a religious belief), then the instructor could not be criticized. Astronomy professors could say the Earth was suspended on the back of a turtle, geology professors could literally argue that rocks are the bones of Gaia, chemists could teach their traditional model of the four (and only four!) elements. The foolproof method of gaining tenure would be to come to class every day and read aloud from the bible…and when the tenure review committee justly voted to boot your butt out the door, sue them for violating your civil rights.
The IDists are definitely desperate when this kind of nutjob dreck is how they decide to defend their ideas. I shouldn’t even bother addressing it, it’s so pathetic…so I’ll leave you to read one defender’s view.
