Submitted to a Candid World

Obama’s inauguration is less than two weeks away, but don’t think for a minute that the culture war is won. The new year is just a week old, and at least two states – South Carolina and Oklahoma – are already legislating themselves towards a federal lawsuit. Today, we’ll cover Oklahoma, where state senators have found in Senate Bill 320 the perfect way to turn their state into a legal laboratory – at the taxpayer’s expense – by filing the “Science Education and Academic Freedom Act,” with the purpose of enabling teachers to address the “scientific strengths and weaknesses” of enumerated theories. Only “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” are singled out for scrutiny.

Oklahoma’s foray into manufacturing scientific controversies comes in almost direct emulation of Louisiana – the only state, out of six who attempted the feat last year, to actually enact an “academic freedom” bill. As always, the bill’s danger lies as much in its putatively objective phraseology as the likelihood of its skewed implementation on the ground. To the uninformed voter or casual observer, there’s nothing not to like when a legislature asks its teachers to evaluate the “scientific strengths and weaknesses. However, the bill only makes sense when viewed in the light of history, and creationists’ repeated attempts to deputize science faculty as theologians or moralists. There is no live scientific controversy regarding the veracity of the general evolutionary framework. And, setting aside Huffington Post climate denialists – HuffPo’s embrace of bunk science is well documented – the same is true of global warming. Gratuitous inclusion of “human cloning” in those theories subject to specialized scrutiny of “scientific strenghts and weaknesses” only proves the point: the only “controversy” related to human cloning is its morality, not its science.

Because it is nearly a carbon copy of the comparable Lousiana statute, the proposed Oklahoma legislation suffers from similar statutory defects (see our earlier analysis of Louisiana’s enacted act). In at least one respect, though, Oklahoma has gone above and beyond the call of duty to encourage willful blindness in its students. Turn to section (E) of the proposed bill:

(E). Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories.

In short, provided the child’s education rests in the hands of a properly-motivated science teacher, answering a question on human origins with the punchy reply “Goddidit” gets you the same grade as a well-reasoned defense of Darwinian evolution. Considering the facts on the ground, this is a scary thought indeed.