More from the article:
Already, legislators in a half-dozen states – Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina – have tried to require that classrooms be open to “views about the scientific strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory,” according to a petition from the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based strategic center of the intelligent design movement.
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” ‘Strengths and weaknesses’ are regular words that have now been drafted into the rhetorical arsenal of creationists,” said Kathy Miller, director of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that promotes religious freedom.
If you are thinking that it can’t happen here, consider the effect on the national publishers of school textbooks:
What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas: the state is one of the country’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are loath to produce different versions of the same material. The ideas that work their way into education here will surface in classrooms throughout the country.
This concept was explored in the realm of high school history textbooks in Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen (hmm… looks like a revised edition of that was just published).
So I guess the question is: Do we want the content of our future science textbooks influenced by the likes of the chairman of the Texas education board, Dr. Don McLeroy?
Dr. McLeroy believes that Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event – thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion.
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But Dr. McLeroy says his rejection of evolution – “I just don’t think it’s true or it’s ever happened” – is not based on religious grounds.
Yikes.
