Here's a distant shot of Clare Wuellner of CFI-Austin in The Dress, giving testimony at Wednesday's SBOE hearings. This comes from Steve Schafersman's own blog. If you'd prefer a more journalistic, detailed, play-by-play account of the day's events — you know, who spoke and what they said — and not just my indignant ranting, Steve's got it. Tons of photos, too. He stayed all day, like a true battle-hardened veteran.
I'll see if Clare can't send along an even better picture of herself.
CFI-Austin, along with Texas Citizens for Science and the UT Section of Integrative Biology, is sponsoring a trio of talks this evening to be held at UT's Burdine Hall, room 108. I think I had some classes there back in the day. The general theme is "Science Education in Texas," which, as you may well know, is under a cloud due to the ideological machinations of the arch-conservative State Board of Education and its young-earth-creationist dentist chairman, Dan McLeroy.
Admission is free and it all starts at 6:30. The speakers include the TCS's own Steve Schafersman, on "How Will Texas Oppose Aggressive, Organized Creationism in Texas?"; Ed Brayton, author of the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, on the religious roots of ID (there's also a Dispatches blog meetup for Ed at Stubb's BBQ Thursday night at 7); and Josh Rosenau, NCSE staffer and author of the blog Thoughts from Kansas, on the evolution of the creationist movement.
I'm going to do my level best to attend. Hope lots of you can too. If you see me there, wave.
Addendum: Well, bummer, you won't see me there. If any of our readers do attend, please post a report in the comments.
Remember how the nutbags at the Institute for Creation Research (second cousins to the Institute for Hobgoblinology, one presumes) have been trying to gain legitimacy in Texas by being allowed to offer degrees in science education? Well, the meeting is coming up, and I hope a zillion people from the pro-science side turn up and tell the board just what a ridiculous proposal this is. Or, at the very least, ask that the creos show their peer reviewed research proving that the Earth was created after the domestication of the dog.
Heads up to George Innis, who posted the following to the CFI-Austin Yahoogroup mailing list:
It appears that The Coordinating Board, TheCB, will take up the Institute for Creation Research, ICR, request for a Certificate of Authority at their meeting on 25 April. This Certificate is the next step in ICR's effort to offer a fundamentalist oriented advanced degree in science education. TheCB was scheduled to consider this matter earlier this year but ICR requested a delay when TheCB indicated that additional documentation would be required. TheCB's Committee on Academic Excellence and Research will consider the proposal from 10AM until noon on the 24th in the Board Room. At this meeting the public may make statements of up to 3 minutes each. I am told that following this meeting the commissioner will finalize his recommendation. A decision is expected at the Board meeting the next day where discussion will probably be brief.
TheCB's offices are at 1200 East Anderson Lane and the Board Room is Room 2.140.
Got that? April 25. If you want Texas to have 21st century — as opposed to 14th century — educational standards, take off work and be there.
To wrap this up: Another memorable part of the talk involved Dawkins' response to Christians who take offense at the supposedly rude and aggressive tone he allegedly uses. While saying that he'd rather be known as a "friend of truth" more than an "enemy of religion," he admitted to being unable to resist "humorous broadsides" against religion and its believers. He compared some of the passages in TGD that Christians have singled out as especially offensive to other examples of criticism, like restaurant reviews in British newspapers, some of which are so scathing and insulting they must be seen to be believed. And these kinds of verbal assaults can be harmful, Dawkins pointed out, as chefs "really exist, while blasphemy is a victimless crime."
Again, we go back to the problem of religion's unmerited privilege of being considered outside the purview of criticism. Everyone today, but especially believers, have gotten used to the idea that we shouldn't be offended, ever, Dawkins noted. But there's no rule that says we have some innate right to expect that, especially in a culture that promotes the free exchange of ideas. In fact, there are many things we should be offended by, like religious fatwas and female genital mutilation. Dawkins went through a list of human atrocities we have a moral duty to find offensive — many of them doled out with the tacit approval of someone's religion — accompanied by a series of slides that elicited ever-increasing applause. It was a touchstone moment of the whole evening's talk.
The idea of how offensive believers find challenges to belief struck a chord with me, as one thing I've noticed over the years is the way in which Christianity in America has managed to become, despite its overwhelming presence in the cultural mainstream, something of an isolated subculture at the same time. There are Christian bookstores, and Christian radio stations, and Christian colleges, and Christian rock bands, and Christian sports teams, and Christian versions of the Yellow Pages that help Christian consumers shop only at overtly Christian businesses. All this sort of thing contributes to an environment where believers can effectively shield themselves from any viewpoint that doesn't embrace and reinforce Christian dogmas and beliefs. To many Christians, you don't even have to be overtly offensive — Don Imus or Ann Coulter style — to offend them. Merely declaring your atheism openly, and not having the good taste to keep your distasteful disbelief to yourself, can be enough to set many believers off.
And it's a fact as well that many Christians who whine about how offensive Dawkins is never think to see what's coming out of their own camp. Even in the comments a few posts down, we get Rhology whining, "Come on, are you really trying to make Dawkins into a guy who never says anythg offensive about Christians?" Well, sure he does, but it's usually in the form of jokes and jabs, as he did last night, in a crack comparing "Christian thinkers...and intelligent people. (Raises hands, chuckles) My apologies!"
Yeah, I guess compared to the recent hateful homophobic rant against gays spewed by Oklahoma representative Sally Kern (a rant enthusiastically supported by her fellow GOP Christian right colleagues and the Thomas More Law Center, who vowed to follow up their wonderful epic fail in Dover by defending Kern against the onslaught of whatever legal action teh gayz were sure to hit her with); compared to the sewage you hear spew from the likes of Coulter and Michael Savage; compared to the way pricks like Ben Stein and Dinesh D'Souza draw links between science and atheism and Hitler and Joe Stalin; compared to the way Judge John E. Jones had to have his whole family protected by U.S. Marshals following his ruling in the Dover trial due to all the death threats they received by loving anti-evolutionist Christians...
Yeah, compared to all that, I can see just how offensive Richard Dawkins is because he wrote a book and went on a promotional tour and cracks the odd joke.
Cry me a river.
Anyway, those are just a couple of highlights from what was, on the whole, an upbeat talk, entertaining, witty, informative, but also passionate and serious in its message and its aim of raising public consciousness to the free ride ancient superstitions have gotten in our culture, and our need to question just how long that free ride should continue. Dawkins ended on a moving and elegaic note, reading the opening paragraph to Unweaving the Rainbow, which he's earmarked to be read at his own funeral and which I'll let you read for yourself.
The Q&A only went for about seven or eight people, I think, mainly because he took a couple of questions at the beginning. But one or two of the questions were memorable.
One guy asked about Expelled, and Dawkins wasted no time in castigating the film and informing everyone of the way in which he and PZ Myers and Genie Scott were lied to by the producers in order to secure their participation. Based on the internet trailer that's been up for a while, Dawkins felt confident the film would not "convince anyone who wasn't already an ignorant fool." Of course, as the whole planet now knows, Dawkins saw the movie Thursday night in Minneapolis, at a screening Myers was bizarrely ejected from. I'm sure we'll now hear his informed opinion of what a loathsome pack of lies it is now he's seen it, pretty quick. (Especially the way the filmmakers doubtless edited his interview to make him look a fool. As a filmmaker myself, I can attest: you can create any effect you wish on the editing suite.)
However, Dawkins did make a very good point regarding effective ways to mount rebuttals to Expelled that I hadn't considered.
The questioner had also asked whether the scientific community needed to rush a pro-evolution documentary into production to counter Ben Stein's bullshit conspiracy-theory agitprop. This was also a topic brought up in a thread on Pharyngula. After pointing out the obvious fact that making films professionally is a damned expensive hobby, Dawkins suggested that such venues as YouTube would work just fine for taking down Expelled's campaign of lies. In this age of ubiquitous self-documentation and pervasive video cameras, it's a head-smackingly obvious solution.
For one thing, I don't think Expelled is going to do much theatrical business beyond a possible "church bus bubble" in its first few days of release. (And it helps to remember that the producers are offering Christian schools cash payouts to take their classes on field trips to see it!) As an independent and a documentary (sorry, I'm now slipping into movie biz mode), it won't open wide and it won't do Narnia numbers. Whatever audience it has will almost certainly come through DVD sales campaigns to churches. So there's no need to rush a cinematic rebuttal before the cameras, and in fact, to do so might have the ironic effect of legitimizing it.
But I can certainly see thousands of biology undergraduates simply dismantling Stein's folly piece by piece and scene by scene with their webcams. Bring it on, gang.
Another questioner asked Dawkins what he thought about the transhumanist ideas of Ray Kurzweil, and the possible future in which biology and technology began to merge. Dawkins allowed as how, as a "product of the century I was born in," the notion of such a merging kind of frightened him. Much of transhumanism sounds like science fiction, he noted, but went onto add that he liked science fiction, and who knows, it might be possible that the biotech future some people predict may in fact occur.
The talk finally ended with another rapturous ovation, after which Dawkins signed books for a line that bled out onto the sidewalk. An enjoyable evening for one and all. Except, perhaps, for any religious fundamentalist cowering in the nosebleed seats.
When I announced the AE Blog Meetup for the Spiderhouse following the talk, I expected maybe five or six people to turn up at most. I eventually took a head count of around 18 of us at the peak of it, and we ended up taking over the Spiderhouse's entire front room (chasing off some poor woman who up until then had had it all to herself, sitting with her coffee, iPod, and reading her book — sorry, whoever you were). I saw some old friends I hadn't talked to in ages, and met quite a few awesome new folks, including several students from Atheist Longhorns. (And boy, was their profile on campus ever raised by this event!) It was a great way to wind down at the end of a long and most gratifying day, and after a Shiner and one slice of rich chocolate espresso cake, it was time for me to turn into a pumpkin. Fade out.
It will be kind of difficult for CFI-Austin to top an event like this in scale and public enthusiasm. But still, this is a hell of a long way for the positive promotion of atheism to have come, just since the days nine years ago when I first joined ACA, and you could fit all of Austin's outed atheists into one dinky bagel shop on 5th Street. An event like tonight really made me feel like I'm part of an exciting and vital community, hopefully one that will someday succeed in taking Richard Dawkins' goal of consciousness-raising to an even larger scale.
Good night and good luck.
Okay, I've had a good night's sleep, gotten a few morning errands done, and now I'm ready to sit down and hammer out my report about yesterday. The short version: a phenomenal and surprising success. If you had told me a scant four years ago that atheism would have such a high public profile, let alone that a prominent atheist scientist wouldn't just be a guy who wrote books only grad students bought but be traveling around the country treated like a rock star, I wouldn't have believed you. Dawkins' wrote in The God Delusion that his primary goal was "consciousness raising," and in that he's been a runaway success.
To see all the photos I took of yesterday's events, check my Flickr set here.
For me the day began at his signing at Book People, which was attended by close to 200 people at my best estimate. As I mentioned in the previous post, Dawkins read the new preface to the paperback edition of TGD, followed by a friendly Q&A and a book signing.
Tangent: While at Book People I bumped into Dr. James H. Dee, a retired professor and friend of CFI, who has written a number of guest editorials espousing atheist and secularist views for the Austin-American Statesman as well as essays for Free Inquiry. Dr. Dee is brilliant and always has interesting insights into religious belief — he tells me he's preparing a book specifically on the afterlife, which ought to be interesting — but one area where he and I (not to mention he and Dawkins) disagree is on the importance of being up to date on cutting-edge theology for those who wish to critique religion. Dr. Dee is very critical of "The Four Horsemen," as they call themselves, because none of them have this advanced scholarly knowledge of the most abstruse theological arguments and Biblical research he believes is vital.
I think Dr. Dee has a point, but I don't think such knowledge is as essential as he thinks. At best, it would be an interesting exercise for someone who had the free time to blow on it. Dawkins has been critiqued, quite inanely, I think, for supposedly ignoring more "advanced" views of God and debunking only the most simplistic and crude forms of Christian belief out there.
What these critics, including Dr. Dee, miss, that I tried to point out, is that the elaborately arcane and abstruse God of the theologians isn't the God that Jack and Jill Churchgoer worship. The overwhelming majority of rank-and-file Christians are no more well versed in the most obscure Biblical scholarship or cutting edge theological legerdemain than Dawkins. To most Christians, God is a grown-up version of Santa Claus; he knows if you've been bad or good so be good for goodness' sake! If a lack of "sophisticated" theological expertise isn't required for over 99.9% of the world's Christians to feel they're justified in believing in God, why should such knowledge be required for an atheist to declare he doesn't believe in God? As Dawkins has said, why should you have to bone up on leprechaunology before deciding you don't believe in leprechauns?
Dr. Dee thinks, with the increase in public awareness and acceptance of atheism in the post-God Delusion cultural climate, that atheists ought to throw the tent wider, so to speak. While guys like Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens can be, shall we say, popularizers of atheism and religious criticism, we ought to make room for those scholars who do keep up on more advanced theological thought, just to know what those arguments are and how to counter. While I still agree with Dawkins that most theology is little more than rhetorical smoke-and-mirrors, as most of it takes God's existence as a given and goes from there as opposed to establishing God's existence with hard evidence first, I think Dr. Dee's got a good idea there. Maybe he can be that scholarly atheist writer, to produce the books that have the academic rigor critics of Dawkins think he lacks.
I know I'm running on about this conversation, but it was really interesting and, I think, relevant. One valid criticism Dr. Dee had of Dawkins, I think, is that when he interviewed Christian leaders like the disgraced Ted Haggard for his documentary The Root of All Evil? (a title chosen by the producers that Dawkins doesn't like), he made the mistake of asking these guys questions pertaining to science. Dr. Dee thinks that if Dawkins were more versed in Biblical scholarship, to the extent of being able to read the earliest available versions of scriptures in their original languages (something Dr. Dee can do), then Dawkins could have called out these prominent Christians on the extent to which they were not only ignorant of things like science, but their own beliefs as well! It's a compelling thought, I must admit.
I was advised to turn up on campus no later than 5:30, but traffic held me back until about 6:15. I was gobsmacked by the line. I knew it would be big, but damn!
If you know the UT campus, the following will have meaning for you. (If you don't, just visualize a big-ass line of people.) The line wrapped itself around Hogg Auditorium, then flowed out and around the adjacent Undergraduate Library (UGL), spilled out onto the South Mall, and finally doubled back on itself, coming up alongside UGL once more. I've never seen anything like that on campus. I eventually found Matt D., got my reserve ticket, and ended up helping him and some of the Atheist Longhorns guys wrangle the line a little bit.
I must confess that I was a little disappointed that there weren't any of the campus Christian groups putting in a visible appearance, clustering around Hogg handing out tracts and the like. Someone told me that a lot of them actually were there, but to attend the talk. To whatever degree there were Christian organizations and their members there, I wouldn't know. If they came, they came to listen, not protest. That's cool. (By contrast, when Dan Barker came to UT — to a much smaller reception, obviously — not long ago, Christian students turned up in force and bombarded him with as many challenging questions as they could think of.)
Once everyone finally filed in — with hundreds having to be turned away — Dawkins was introduced by one Dr. Buss (I think that was his name — I suck remembering names) to thunderous applause. But as there was some problem getting the Powerpoint projector to work properly, Dawkins actually began an impromptu Q&A to fill time while his assistants scrambled with cables behind the scenes. I liked the way that turned out, because it gave the whole lecture a more accessible feel. By interacting with the audience first, he established rapport with them right away, and never came across as the ivory-tower professor lecturing to the masses, as it were. (Maybe Dawkins is really only good at being "personable" before a large audience, but if it's what works for him, fine.)
As expected, the lecture was a recap of most of the main points of TGD, primarily those parts of the book dealing with the harmful effects religion has on culture as a whole. But I was grateful the talk wasn't just one big reading. Dawkins has truncated his book and created a real presentation out of it, accompanied by a slideshow both informative and humorous, and quite often sobering as well.
Just to touch on a couple of bits that stood out for me: One of the book's efforts at consciousness raising is to question the privileged position religion has always held in culture. It's been considered something that is above criticism. To express doubt about a person's belief in this or that imaginary sky fairy is to be uncouth and ill-mannered in the extreme. You can tell a person their favorite band sucks, and that their politics are full of shit, and even — in desperate situations — that their spouse is a gold-digging bitch or drunk abusive shitheel and they'd be better off alone. But don't touch their religion! Why should this be? Why should religion deserve this privileged status among all of humanity's ideas, especially as its ideas are usually the ones least supportable by rational argument and evidence?
If there's one part in all of TGD that makes the steam erupt from Christians' ears, it's what Dawkins has to say about the religious indoctrination of children. The brutal fact is that the man is on point. Isn't it interesting that most people almost always fall into the religion of their parents? And why should this be? Childhood indoctrination, pure and simple. But is this right? How can it be, any more than it could be right to indoctrinate a child too young to understand what they're being taught into one or another political ideology?
And yet you'll never see a Christian's face turn redder than when Dawkins points out that's there's no such thing as a Christian child or a Muslim child, that all you can really say is that this is a child of Christian or Muslim (or whatever religion) parents. Dawkins presented a slide of three children taking part in a nativity play, that he clipped from some British newspaper. The children — each only 4 years old — are identified as Christian, Jewish and Muslim, and the original article, we were told, went on gushingly about how lovely it was that these little 4-year-olds from different faiths could come together in the same nativity play. Obviously it never occurred to the reporter to think that maybe those children weren't aware — being 4 years old — that the fact they were from "different faiths" meant there was a presupposition they should reflexively hate each other. Or that what their "faiths" were even all about. After all, they're 4 years old. Dawkins' next slide showed the same caption, but he had replaced the names of the faiths with those of different political parties. Now the absurdity of the whole thing was clear as day.
If you wouldn't identify a 4-year-old child as a Republican, or a Democrat, or a Socialist, or a Marxist, or an Objectivist, or a Libertarian, or even an atheist or agnostic, then how can it possibly make sense to identify them as Christian or Jewish or Muslim? How can a 4-year-old be expected to comprehend religion when they're too young to comprehend politics or philosophy? You can't. A 4-year-old is no more capable of being a "Christian child" than it is of being an "Objectivist child." And here's the part that makes Christians' heads completely explode: to impose a belief on a child too young to understand that belief, Dawkins opines, is tantamount to child abuse.
That's pretty heavy. But in principle, I agree. Now naturally, when people hear the word "abuse" in the first place, their immediate association is with physical abuse. And so you hear Christians time and again wail that Dawkins is comparing them to child beaters for taking their precious widdle babies to Sunday School. This is emphatically not what Dawkins means. He simply means that — intellectually, developmentally, psychologically — it is abusive to impose ideas and beliefs upon the mind of a person incapable of understanding what it is they are being told they must believe. A 4-year-old is not intellectually equipped to evaluate ideas critically, is not emotionally capable of standing up to parental authority, and not mature enough to make its own decisions. Given this fact, while parental guidance is necessary for the child in most things (basic care, really), when it comes to beliefs, imposing a religion upon them is as wrong as imposing a political ideology.
But is the use of the word "abuse" here too strong? I'll grant, having been raised by Christian parents, that in most cases it may be, and that Dawkins' use of the term may be overreaching. I think most parents just raise their children into their own religion because their religion is so woven into the very fabric of their lives it just doesn't occur to them they shouldn't. So in most cases, where I might differ from Dawkins is in preferring the word "negligence" to "abuse." A parent who simply imposes their religion upon their very young children, but isn't motivated by any sort of malice and are simply doing what they're doing because they haven't stopped to wonder even if it's a thing they ought to be doing, is at most guilty of negligence. They may not be abusing their child by not letting them come to whatever religion they might choose (including, perhaps, none) in their own time. But they are being unfair to the child by forcing that decision on them when they're too young to understand. Remember, I said in most cases.
In some cases, though, there is no denying that religious indoctrination of children is child abuse.
Behold.
And yes, Dawkins is dead on when he says it's also child abuse to scare the shit out of a kid and tell them they'll burn forever in hell if they don't love Jesus, too.
Frank Zappa, when he was alive, actually espoused a view similar to Dawkins vis-a-vis kids and religion. I remember a few years before he died, Zappa was interviewed on either The Today Show or Good Morning America, and the subject got around to his family; the Zappa family was always a very closely-knit unit. Zappa, warning the interviewer that she wasn't going to like what he was about to say, gave his formula for raising perfect children: "Keep them away from religion...Choosing a religion is a very important decision, and a child should not have that decision forced on them when they haven't got enough data to make their own choice."
Personally I can't see what it is that people find so appalling and horrible about this idea. It's simply one that supports freedom of conscience, even for our society's youngest members, and Dawkins just has the guts to criticize those parents who don't allow their own children to develop their own freedom of conscience where religious belief is concerned.
But that ties back into his point about the privileged position religion holds in our culture, as this subject that is granted immunity from criticism. Most parents would probably object to the notion of indoctrinating children in some radical political fringe. But tell them they shouldn't shove Jesus down their kids' throats either, and suddenly you're the asshole.
End of Part 1. This is taking longer than I thought, in and among all the other things I have to do today. But you know me: thorough. Or is that "long-winded"? Anyway, I'll wrap up my report of the talk either late tonight or early in the morning. Go ahead and start commenting and Digging if you like.
Check that last date. Austin's been getting all the best tours lately! Expect a detailed report.
Here in Austin, the fine folks at CFI have another little Darwin Day celebration going on tomorrow afternoon at Book People. Just like last year, there will be talks by UT professors on the subject of "The Relevance of Evolution to Our Everyday Lives," while for the kiddies, there will be storytime and science activities on the second floor. All of which culminates in the most important part of all, cutting the birthday cake. Check here for more info. Hope every pro-science Austinite can come and bring a friend.
Last night I attended the meeting sponsored by the tireless folks at CFI-Austin, "Will Texas Support 21st Century Science Education?" I arrived a little early and bumped into Matt Dillahunty. Soon I was glad I hadn't walked in the door ten minutes later than I actually did. The room filled up quickly, soon swelling to SRO status and quite possibly violating fire codes. I did a quick head count and stopped at 60, guesstimating about 20 more faces buried in the back of the crowd I couldn't fully see.
The enormous turnout was heartening for many reasons, not the least of which is that when the forces of ignorance and scientific illiteracy begin their campaign to dismantle science education in Texas this year, they're going to meet with some organized and vocal opposition quite prepared to humiliate them in their efforts every step of the way. The Christian Right may have a stranglehold on politics in this state. But as their ill-advised firing of Chris Comer, a bit of local political shenanigans that quickly became an international outrage once word got out through the intertubes, illustrated, when they try to mess with the realities of science, the real world is not so accommodating to their ideologies.
Steven Schafersman of Texas Citizens for Science was first to speak. Schafersman has spent 27 years on the front lines fighting creationists in their attempts to infiltrate schools, so he's seen firsthand just how much creationism has evolved in that time. But he described the current situation in Texas as "one of the worst situations that I've ever seen."
As many of you may not know, Texas has long been what's called an "adoption state" in terms of how textbooks are chosen for public schools. A small group of people in state politics chooses all the textbooks for the entire state. (Many states let each individual school board choose.) In Texas, the selection process had long been influenced by a fundamentalist Christian couple, Mel and Norma Gabler. The Gablers ran roughshod over every textbook submitted for approval, demanding deletions to evolution in biology texts, deletions to information about contraception in health texts, and other things. Censorship of textbooks in Texas got so bad that a number of textbook publishers would simply release "Texas editions" of their books. The idea that religious ideologues can effectively censor students' access to knowledge is chilling, to say the least.
Mel Gabler died in 2004, Norma last summer. With their passing, fundie whitewashing of textbooks stopped, though the selection process is still mired in politics. The pro-science community succeeded in thwarting the efforts of creationists and their well-funded leaders at the Discovery Institute in 2003 — a process that several ACA members including Kazim and myself participated in directly — but failed in 2004 when health texts came up for review, with the result that teenagers in this state are still not getting health texts informing them of the proper use of contraception to avoid unwanted pregnancy and STD's. Hey, what's a few dead kids as long as you're standing up for Jebus, eh?
Here's why the situation for science is so dire right now. Science standards are coming up for review later this year, and right now, the State Board of Education is not only run by a YEC, but out of the SBOE's fifteen members, seven of them are YEC's. Schafersman has described them as "very aggressive" and certain to make a set of standards that has already been graded an "F" even worse. (This was done by the Fordham Institute, a conservative organization, interestingly enough, but not one with a fundamentalist agenda.)
Chris Comer's firing in 2007 was part of an effort to purge pro-science individuals from positions of influence in Texas education. The whole thing of sacking her based on supposed insubordination and bad performance was just their little dog and pony show. The real goal is to remove anyone who has anything nice to say about evolution — let alone anyone who recognizes it as the foundational principle underlying all biology — from the rolls.
Now this part is important: Right now the fundies are running some fundie wingnut against Patricia Hardy, a non-fundamentalist, non-creationist Republican. If Hardy loses to this person, then the YEC's will flip to a majority on the SBOE and every schoolchild in Texas will be assured of a 19th century education. In other words, they'll be fuct, and Texas will become as bad a laughingstock as Kansas was a few years back.
What about the Democrats, you ask? Who are they running? Well, no one. Apparently the Democratic party in Texas doesn't care about the SBOE, preferring to devote its efforts toward the legislature. So that means there's no outright progressive, solidly pro-science candidate to vote for. The best we have is a moderate Republican. But that's better than nothing, I imagine.
Anyway, Schafersman reiterated that there is a "great deal of apprehension about what's going to happen this year." How exactly are the creos going to strike? Well, ID has failed stupendously, despite the efforts and the millions spent by Discovery. After Dover, even Dan McLeroy, the cretinous YEC dentist who heads up the SBOE (and who I remember seemed to think he was onto something at the 2003 textbook hearings by constantly asking UT biology professors if evolution was as well-supported by scientific evidence as gravity), is careful openly to acknowledge the lack of support ID has from the scientific community, and that it is thus inappropriate to teach.
But this is simply McLeroy's (and the rest of the YEC's) grinning Cheshire Cat face for the media. The agenda now is to demand that the "weaknesses" of scientific theories like evolution must be discussed in classrooms. You know, fair and balanced and all that. This is bogus for several reasons, not the least of which is that the things the creos trumpet as "weaknesses" — Jonathan Wells' foolish "icons of evolution"; Behe's broken record about "irreducible complexity" — aren't "weaknesses" at all for evolution. They're merely made-up hand-waving nonsense the creos throw out to impress the scientifically illiterate. Also, while the idea of addressing "weaknesses" in scientific theories is, in principle, supposed to be applied to all fields of science, when the rubber meets the road, it's only evolution that finds itself under the weight of that demand. Hypocritical much? Why yes. But these are creationists. What do you expect? Integrity? Honesty? Knowledge? Ha.
Remember, these are not people who care about knowledge. These are people desperately attempting to protect a bronze age religion from the modern ideas and scientific facts that defy its magical claims. Their whole lives are rooted in the desperate belief that there's a god willing and eager to grant them eternal life, and if this belief is debunked, then they're doomed to plunge into a whirlpool of existential despair and hopelessness they probably cannot escape. So if it's a choice between understanding science and hanging on to the hope they'll never die, they'll pick the latter, thank you. They're the modern day equivalent of the people who imprisoned Galileo and murdered Giordano Bruno, and make no mistake about it.
More shenanigans from the "Goddidit" crowd involve the Institute for Creation Research attempting to get accreditation in Texas so they can offer master's degrees in science education here. They'd been trying to do the whole process under the table, with the help of creationist sympathizers in the Texas GOP. Once Texas Citizens for Science got wind of what they were up to and made it public, things have been a little bit rougher for the ICR's efforts. Right now, the hearing to determine what to do about the ICR's application has been pushed back from January 24 to April 24. We'll be following this closely.
Schafersman then introduced Chris Comer, who got a huge round of applause for being, in effect, evolution's first "martyr" in Texas. Chris didn't and couldn't say much, as Schafersman had cautioned us there could be litigation pending concerning her firing, and so Comer was under orders from her lawyers not to take questions about the firing itself. (Good, I hope she takes the assholes to the cleaners and leaves them there naked.) But Comer did tell us that the "forces at play here are huge" and that the whole situation concerning science education in Texas is "far worse than I ever, ever dreamed it would be." As an indicator of just how thin the ice is on which we're all skating: there is an end-of-course biology test, currently optional, that will be required of all Texas students as of 2012. Last month there was an attempt to remove all references to evolution from this test, and it almost worked.
Schafersman told us all that, unlike Dover, where fed-up citizens finally got their own back by voting out all of the creationist idiots from their school board after the trial that had damaged their community was over, in Texas it will be harder to rely on the electoral process alone to fix the SBOE. Once again, the Christian Right controls the GOP here (mavericks like Hardy notwithstanding), and the Democrats don't want to play. So the key to saving science — and saving students — in Texas will be grassroots movements that constantly shine a light on what the creos try to pull whenever they try to pull it. Comer's firing was met by unanimous condemnation in newspaper editorials not merely throughout Texas, but the whole country and overseas as well. By keeping this kind of attention on creationism's sneaky BS, pro-science Texas citizens can ensure that science education in Texas does not fall victim to a religious auto-da-fé anytime soon.
If you want to keep up with this (and you want to keep up with this), bookmark the Texas Citizens for Science page as well as the Texas Freedom Network's Stand Up for Science campaign.
A final note. During the lengthy Q&A, a high school teacher whose name I didn't catch made an interesting point. Whatever goes on with the textbooks, it was his experience that students didn't really read their textbooks anyway. What with the internet able to provide all sorts of information to students directly, regardless of whether it's been vetted by Christian Right ideologues, wouldn't it be an easy thing for science teachers simply to encourage students to visit such sites as the Talk Origins archive, the Panda's Thumb, and others, to get the lowdown on the down low about real science? It was a neat idea, and certainly a fun suggestion of the way teachers can rebel if education standards are in fact undermined as badly as the creationists want them to be. I think teachers should do this anyway...but we still have to keep up the fight, and keep it as bloody as it needs to be.
Addendum, Monday: If you're one of the folks who's popped over from Pharyngula, welcome...and please Digg this article to spread awareness of what's going on in Texas. Thanks.
This is beyond appalling. Remember the talk given here in Austin by Barbara Forrest back at the beginning of the month? It turns out that creationist sympathizers in the Texas Education Agency (rapidly becoming a grossly misnamed entity) have forced the resignation of their science curriculum director, Chris Comer, for forwarding an email promoting that talk. It's as egregious an act of theocratic political retaliation as you're likely to see. The lead in this Statesman article is boggling in its implications.
The state's director of science curriculum has resigned after being accused of creating the appearance of bias against teaching intelligent design.
Think about this sentence for a minute. Let it sink in. Imagine, for a moment, if it had read: "The state's director of science curriculum has resigned after being accused of creating the appearance of bias against teaching that the earth is flat." Or what if it had read, "The state's director of history curriculum has resigned after being accused of creating the appearance of bias against teaching Holocaust denial." What if we actually lived in that world?
Newsflash: we do live in that world. America is gleefully abandoning everything that the Enlightenment stood for and racing backwards into the Middle Ages with open arms. I don't like to deal in slippery slope fallacies. But when one has to deal with Christianists and their political machinations, it hardly seems beyond the pale to think these are people who won't rest until absolutely everything modern science teaches us about the world that in any way appears to threaten their precious fantasies about their invisible sky fairy will be suppressed, its proponents driven out of jobs and positions of public influence. (No, I'll stop short of hysteria about Gulags, and leave that bit of paranoia to the fundamentalists and their little persecution complexes.)
No surprises about who ordered Comer fired. Lizzette Reynolds is a TEA member who used to work for — wait for it — the Bush administration.
"This is highly inappropriate," Reynolds said in an e-mail to Comer's supervisors. "I believe this is an offense that calls for termination or, at the very least, reassignment of responsibilities.
"This is something that the State Board, the Governor's Office and members of the Legislature would be extremely upset to see because it assumes this is a subject that the agency supports."
Yes, well, we all know how Bush and his boys are not exactly supporters of evidence-based facts, and indeed their whole policy of "if the facts don't support our agenda, just make some up" is entirely in keeping with the modus operandi of ID creationists. Reynolds is a chip off their little Orwellian block, isn't she?
I say we make a stink about this, and Comer's firing should be a major talking point when science textbooks come up for review again in early 2008.
Here is the letter to the editor that I just sent to the Statesman:
I am appalled to read of the political retaliation in the Texas Education Agency against Chris Comer for, in the article's words, "creating the appearance of bias against teaching intelligent design."
Imagine if the article had stated Comer had been forced out for "creating the appearance of bias against teaching the Earth is flat." Since when is the promotion of accurate science teaching a firing offense?
Religious extremists in the TEA don’t want students and citizens to know a simple fact that threatens their ideology: that "intelligent design" was laughably revealed to be the poorest pseudoscience in the 2005 Dover trial, and the so-called "controversy" over evolution exists only in the minds of the evolution opponents whose dishonesty and ignorance were laid bare in that trial.
Anti-science extremists in the religious right are playing politics with the education of Texas' kids. If facts get in the way, shoot the messenger!
Go to statesman.com, and click on Opinion > Letters to write your own.
The fine folks at CFI-Austin are sponsoring a talk tomorrow night from 7-9 p.m. by Barbara Forrest, one of the authors of Creationism's Trojan Horse. Forrest has been active in the front lines of the ID wars, and she'll be talking about her participation in the Dover trial as well as giving an overview of the whole ID movement. Should be excellent! It all takes place at the Monarch Event Center, Suite 3100, 6406 North IH-35 in Austin. That's just north of 290/2222, on the west side of 35, in the shopping center where the World Gym is. Miss it not if supporting proper science education matters to you.
At the National Center for Science Education website, you can read this piece by Forrest about her role in Kitzmiller.
Tomorrow at Book People here in Austin, the fine folks of CFI-Austin will be helping the creationists celebrate Earth's birthday! As we all know, creationism proves the Earth was magicafully wished into being by God on October 23, 4004 BC. So in celebration of this momentous occasion, let there be cake, let there be cookies, let there be punch, and let there be talks by prominent UT scientists! Uh...okay, that last bit might throw a little bit of cold water on the creationists' view of things. But who says that getting a real education can't be fun? Come one, come all. Festivites run from 1:00-3:30 pm.
Marginally more awesome than this is that I'll be ducking out of the party early to be a guest on the Atheist Experience TV show for the first time in ages. This is all part and parcel of the show's 10th Anniversary celebrations, the main program for which takes place next Sunday with a full round-table featuring every host and co-host the show's ever had. Thing is, I can't make it next Sunday, so they're putting me on tomorrow instead. Tune in and call up. 3:00 pm on channel 10, as usual.
Jeez, I've been slacking bad on this. Those fine folks at the Center for Inquiry Community of Austin are sponsoring a visit by Victor J. Stenger, author of the new Prometheus title God: The Failed Hypothesis this Saturday morning at 11:30 AM at Book People. So if you're an Austin atheist, and I hear we have a few, this would be worth waking up for. Do come.
