I’m going to be leaving soon for my road trip to Tallahassee. I plan on live-blogging the state board of education meeting starting bright and early in the morning with posts about the speaker sign up process, what the crowd is looking like and such.
Meanwhile, here is a news roundup:
Orlando Sentinel: What you should know about Tuesday’s vote on evolution. There is a poll there you might want to vote in.
Ocala.com: Finish the debate about life’s start
Lakeland Ledger: Teach Evolution As Science
Florida Today:Â No place for intelligent design in science class
Miami Herald: Schools await board’s vote on evolution
And don’t overlook the two news releases I posted earlier this morning. Just scroll on down to the next post.
Am I just stupid, or is the item not on the Agenda here: http://www.fldoe.org/meetings/2008_02_19/agenda.asp
Kim,
Not to worry. Item #1 is the new standards.
These are public schools. We teach science in them. Not religion.
Churches do not pay taxes to support public schools.
Many churches have their own private schools that do not have to adhere to State Standards.
We are not pushing state science standards into their private schools.
How is it that they feel they have the right to inject their religious ideologies (specifically and only Christian creationism) into public science classes?
And, WHY does the State Board of a PUBLIC school system (NOT funded by the churches) feel that they have to answer to or placate or be influenced by these religious organizations?
I don’t expect an answer to these questions.
At some point though, we need to find a way to strengthen the separation of church and state. I see the Wedge strategy (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0608/S00102.htm) as a direct affront on democracy and religious freedom.
Florida’s Science Standards are but one small fight in a much larger battle.
The orange guy made it to YouTube! Is there any way we can get the BoE to watch it just one more time?
You should read some of the comments if you get a chance – one of them even claimed that he saw Jesus get up and walk out of that one! LOL!
February 19, 2008: Grafixer’s right. The issue is the separation of church and state. Both intelligent design and creationism are not science. They’re not even theories in the proper scientific sense, because neither in principle or in reality is TESTABLE. TESTABILITY is the gold standard for what constitutes an authentically scientific theory. Intelligent design and creationism are not scientific theories, nor facts. They are RELIGION MASQUERADING AS SCIENCE SEEKING BEING SMUGGLED INTO TAX-SUPPORTED PUBLIC SCHOOLS. The lie that separation of church and state is not part of the First Amendment IS A LIE. And even from the standpoint of what both legal scholars and historians might call, “original intent,” separation of church and state is part of the First Amendment. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights itself was ORIGINALLY INSPIRED by the VIRGINIA RELIGIOUS FREEDOM STATUTES. The two key Virginia politicians who worked for the Virginia Religious Freedom Statutes were, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and they got these statutes passed in the 1780s after a lengthy political battle inside Virginia. After Jefferson went to Paris, France, as an American diplomat, Madison took up the fight for what became the First Amendment around the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787-1789. The First Amendment emerged in 1791. Madison was its primary author. In 1802, while in his first term as president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was lobbied by Connecticut clergymen from Danbury who tried to get Jesus Christ officially mentioned in the Constitution and wanted Jefferson’s help. At that time, Jefferson, in a famous letter to these clergy, wrote, he could not do that, because the Constitution was intended, Jefferson wrote himself, to establish a “wall of separation between church and state.” So the notion there was no separation of church and state is quite literally a lie, and those creationists and intelligent design promoters who say this are quite literally either lying or simply ignorant of the historical facts and original intent of the founders. But they don’t care, because they have a THEOCRATIC POLITICAL AGENDA of getting RELIGION SMUGGLED INTO TAX-SUPPORTED GOVERNMENT and dominating the rest of us with their particularly narrow Christian theocratic sectarian type of belief system which they want the rest of us to bow down to and obey. THAT IS THEIR REAL AGENDA. They are essentially the American Christian Dominionist Taliban, no different in essentials than the Islamic Taliban in the Near East.–Allan Greene