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Saturday, April 9, 2011

Tennessee teachers can now safely question evolution

The bill I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago is now law in Tennessee. The bill is designed to "promote critical thinking" in science classrooms. It sounds benign but the clear intent is to allow teachers to teach both creationism or intelligent design and evolution and to allow global warming skeptics their side of the argument.

The result could be that teachers may feel impelled to consider creationism because all it will take is one fundamentalist kid to go running home to his/her parents and complain. In fact these children will be encouraged by their parents to challenge evolution in class. In God fearing Tennessee consider this a given and consider it a given that any teacher that shrugs off the discussion will have lots of explaining to do to the local school board.

It passed by a vote of 70-23. The debate in the House created some laughs and backscratching.

Bill supporter Rep. Richard Floyd, R-Chattanooga, said that “since the late ‘50s, early ‘60s when we let the intellectual bullies hijack our education system, we’ve been on a slippery slope.”

Rep. Sheila Butt, R-Columbia, said when she was in high school, “we gave up Aqua Net hair spray” because of fears “it was causing global warming.”

“Since then scientists have said that maybe we shouldn’t have given up that aerosol can because that aerosol can was actually absorbing the Earth’s rays and keeping us from global warming.”

Rep. Frank Niceley came up with an even more creative rationale. He claimed that because Albert Einstein was a Christian, ergo creationism should be taught in schools. Einstein was actually an agnostic Jew who left Germany in 1933 because of his religion These imbeciles are the best argument against evolution. Their is no evidence that their brains are evolving.

What the fuck!. More of the idiocy at the link.

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