Archive for August 10, 2008

Texas Schools Offer an “Elective” Bible Course

Now, potentially, Texan for "school."

Evangelical fundamentalists – those rogues who consider it their personal duty to shove Christianity in your face by any means necessary – have just found an effective loophole to get a Bible in front of your kids on the state’s dime. Seriously, you close off one avenue of attack, and these people find another & adapt.  Like the Borg.  The Jesus Borg.

The news comes from Texas, whose public high schools will now be required to offer an elective course on the Bible, geared towards the document’s “historical and literary value.”  I’m the biggest Texas apologist there is – I love and miss the state – but this is too far.

It started in North Texas, where schools took advantage of the option, legit under the Texas Constitution, to teach a Bible elective under those parameters:

I’m fine with an optional, district-by-district Bible elective, as described in the video.  Grassroots control is great, and carries fewer of the fears of the top-down establishment of state religion.  Granting options is one thing.  But requiring every district to read from a Christian document – like it or not – is another, and sends a vastly different message.

Read & watch the only report I could find on the issue, curiously from Milwaukee (Mil-wha? Her?).  Then, it’s time to switch into law mode.

Constitutionally, the “mandatory elective” scheme presents a problem… but only to those willing to look closely, which today’s Supreme Court cannot be trusted to do. While a class focused on the historical & literary value of the Bible seems unproblematic in theory, the class, in practice, would function as an invitation for evangelizing, and the law ought not divorce the constitutionality of a scheme from its likely effects on the ground.  A Bible elective would effectively give a forum to a million would-be Freshwaters. Especially when Texans (in the Milwaukee report) describe the mandatory elective as an issue of “religious freedom,” we have cause for concern.

Further, a mandatory elective scheme requires the state to disburse money, even to those who don’t want it, in support of a sectarian document.  Former NYU Law faculty member Noah Feldman (come back Noah!) has argued ((Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem — and What We Should Do About It, 2005)) that the content-sensitive disbursal of money to select religious groups ought to, alone, render any plausibly religious policy presumptively unconstitutional.  These flaws suggest that the elective scheme – by fostering excessive entanglement of church & state, and abandoning state neutrality towards religion – fails to satisfy the Lemon v. Kurtzman legal standard for separation of church & state.  But with a 4-4 Court, and a swing vote (Kennedy) who’s known to give the benefit of the doubt to religion, such fair-minded administration of justice cannot be expected.  It looks to me like Texas has found a loophole that’ll work.

That doesn’t mean that we should be happy about it.  Especially given the parade of horribles this new loophole invites into the classroom.  The Milwaukee report lingers on the picture of a biology textbook: just so. This could be a way to teach creationism to kids on the sly – as science, just not in science class – which, as Chris Comer ought to be able to tell us, Texas officials have been lusting to do. ((Those links are to independent reports – “The Pandas Thumb,” as always, has comprehensive coverage of Chris Comer here, and coverage of Texas’ descent into pseudoscience here))

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America’s Next Vice President Is…

According to an e-mail received by Obama supporters, from David Plouffe, Obama is “about to make” his pick – which, to me, suggests today at the latest.

It’s likely, then, that Obama will beat McCain to his pick, going part of the way to securing needed campaign momentum, and putting a fresh face on the election.

If you want to know the minute the decision is announced, text “VP” to 62262 (“Obama Mobile” – standard fees apply).

Iraq Demands a Timeline

Iraq wants a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.  Ahh, nation-building goes by so fast, that you hardly realize it’s time for them to go out on their own.  How will McCain spin this, now that Obama’s policy (principled withdrawal) has garnered the endorsement of the occupied nation?  And, more importantly, who will Bush invade, once Empty Nest Syndrome sets in?

Playing Dirty, but Inconsistently So

Bush’s greatest asset was his ability to stay on-message and follow the lead of disciplined campaign staff: it swept him to victory at least one and a half times, and allowed his message to dominate the airwaves for eight years.  Blissfully, McCain lacks both abilities.  This inconsistency – the New York Times reports – flows as much from conflict in the upper ranks about the importance of negativity as it does from McCain’s lack of discipline.  Focusing on that last point, shouldn’t that matter, and go to McCain’s ability to lead?  It might work for air squadrons, but I doubt it works for a country.

The Discovery Institute & the Culture Wars: Giving up on Secrecy

Conventional wisdom holds that, when you’ve dug yourself into a hole, you should stop digging.  But, then again, if your religious beliefs require you to keep digging, and to hell with the rest of the world, far be it for me to stop you.

Intelligent design suffered a major blow – more major than ID creationists are willing to admit – with the decision of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which for the first time evaluated ID legally, and unsurprisingly concluded that it was religion in disguise.  While ID creationists frame this as losing the battle – not the war – in truth, it was both.  ID’s appeal to agents of the culture wars, like the Discovery Institute, rested on its secret connection to religion, and its superficial scientific appearance: it could, in theory, win adherents before anyone even realized that it was religion & creationist talking points in disguise. Kitzmiller essentially blew the lid on ID creationism during its maiden voyage; by revealing its true nature too soon, its transformative potential was completely lost.

From there, the ID movement completely lost control of the message, as zealous but under-strategized culture warriors claimed ID as their own, new, special brand of creationism, without attempting to hide the religious message, and without even making an effort to appear scientific (except in a “teach the controversy” sort of way).  Exemplum gratis, Ben Stein – although it made an attempt to be scientific about ID, Expelled was overtly religious in its message.  The strange part, though, comes with the Discovery Institute’s own newfound openness about their religious message.  Just ask “Senior Discovery Institute Fellow” Michael Medved:

The important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory – which is something I think they need to make more clear. Nor is Intelligent Design an explanation. Intelligent Design is a challenge. It’s a challenge to evolution. It does not replace evolution with something else.

Wow.  In the rest of the interview, from which the “Panda’s Thumb” excerpt is drawn, Medved keeps on digging, explaining that, “if you’re serious about your religion, as I try to be, then your religion is connected to everything you do – certainly to everything that’s important to you.”  Clearly this is not a man, and clearly this is not an institution, capable of separating religion from science.  It’s like Medved & the Discovery Insitute have finally given up on ID creationism being taken seriously by legal scholars, or by scientists, ever again.  I’m fine with that.  Let them keep digging.

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Sunday Special: Bad Conservative Blogs & Fail

Every now and again, I wind my way over to the theo-conservative side of the internet – “American Thinker,” “TownHall.com,” and “Human Events” – and find myself absolutely dumbstruck by the sheer abysmal quality of the writing over there.  A brief rundown of what seems to be the most popular, and why it’s wrong:

1. TownHall.com – “Jesus and the Case for War”: this piece tries to make sense of the seeming contradiction between Jesus’ words, the Christian commandments – love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, etc. – and the neoconservative to subdue the remainder of the world by force of arms.  The author comes up with a “just war” theory, namely, that sometimes war is the “least bad choice available,” and the best option to save the lives of innocents.  Sure.  Most people agree with that.  It’s in uniting that belief with Christian theology that the author makes his error. In the course of making the argument, the author dredges up some other scripture in seeming support of war.  The problem here is that the contradiction between passages of scripture, and Christian beliefs & deeds, goes deeper than the author even imagines, and exposes yet another problem with Biblical literalism.  Take Luke 12:49–53, where Jesus tells his followers that he brings war, not peace.  TownHall authors & readers may explain this away as either a metaphor or an endorsement of just war theory, but it actually reveals a schism in the early church.  The current New Testament represents the blending of many different Jesus narratives, some of which saw Jesus as a violent figure come to overthrow the kingdom of Man, to institute, by force, a Gnostic purity of dedication to the soul.  Thus, the question posed by the article – “would Jesus support war?” – isn’t the right question to ask.  The proper question is, “which Jesus do I believe in, and would he support war?”  Scripture is never simple.  And if you believe in God, it’s not supposed to be, either. Ask Augustine of Hippo. Theology fail.
2. The American “Thinker” – “Obama’s Abstract Patriotism”: Barack Obama took a lot of flack for not wearing a lapel pin.  He defended himself by arguing – correctly, but in violation of Rove’s Law – that patriotism is many things to many people, and it’s more than an empty deed, like wearing a pin.  It’s how you serve your country, service that sometimes includes sacrifice, that matters.  In this piece, the author (Larrey Anderson, an alleged philosopher), warps Obama’s statement about the necessity of personal sacrifice for patriotism, attempts to frame it as a fascist subordination of the self, and accuses Obama of, by emphasizing the sacrifice inherent in patriotism, not understanding the complexity of patriotism, and its multiple meanings to multiple people.  Taking the last point first, the oversimplification of patriotism (“America: love it or leave it!”) is a conservative sin, not a liberal one, one that the author perpetuates by re-emphasizing the flag pin scenario.  To argue that Obama insults simple patriotism by not mindlessly following the crowd, and then excoriate Obama for making patriotism simple and uniform, is an incoherent attempt to have it both ways.  Even worse, though, is the attempt to make Obama’s reaffirmation of the patriot’s duty to put the country first into something sinister.  Obama’s call for selfless patriotism follows in a long tradition of American conceptions of our relationship with the state, and to make it sound sinister – “Obama’s notion of ‘a call to sacrifice for the country’s greater good’ is not patriotic — it is Orwellian” - would equally tar John F. Kennedy (“ask not what your country can do for you, as what you can do for your country”) as a new Mussolini.  Philosophy AND patriotism fail.
3. TownHall.com, “The Democrat Plan for Losing”: God, I hate the eternal attempt to rename the Democratic Party against its will.  It’s so insidious and evil.  So Rovian.  This junk is just another attempt to make it sound like Obama’s only energy plan is conservation, and that he’s opposed to a compromise measure (some drilling + renewable energy), when the opposite is true.  Fact-checking fail.
4. TownHall.com, “Planned Parenthood’s Sexual Miseducation”: it’s fair to mock Planned Parenthood’s admittedly sometimes overzealous sex ed videos & awareness campaigns.  But this commentator goes too far, mocking Planned Parenthood not for their zeal & gross-out factor, but for their ideology, namely, for their attempt to teach sexual health rather than abstinence: “For Planned Parenthood and the anything-goes ethos it represents, young people are always going to have sex.“  News flash: young people are always going to have sex.  Abstinence-only programs are aspirational only, and ignore the last million years of human history, whereby teenagers, despite the best education & care money can buy, will be more influenced by hormones than by parents.  To pretend that teens won’t have sex, and object to teaching safe sex on those grounds, is the logical equivalent of arguing against auto insurance because people shouldn’t get in car accidents.  Reality check fail.

There’s only so much of these places I can handle.

A Cheap Shot

McCain needs more sleep.  Guess he won’t be able to pick up Hillary’s famous 3 AM call.

…we now return to your regularly scheduled website, which generally prides itself on being above such punditry.