Gore: creationism OK

[W. Kiernan]

G*rd*n wrote:
> 
> Max B. Sawicky:
> > ...
> > Otherwise you are quite right.  A concession on this issue could
> > be amply rewarded by something much more important in return.
> > After all, what's in question is not a national mandate to teach
> > creationism, but merely a ratification of what has always been
> > the case, more-or-less -- public education is locally controlled.
> > In this issue, it comes down to how much trust one puts in
> > popular democracy.  Follow-up news reports have indicated
> > that Kansas teachers are going to go right on doing whatever
> > they were doing prior to this flap.  ...
> 
> I have read the news stories about this set of events only
> sporadically, but it is my impression that no one in Kansas
> is commanded not to teach evolution, but only that questions
> about evolution are to be removed from statewide tests,
> thus making the teaching of evolution optional rather than
> required, thus allowing those students who wish to believe
> in creationism or some other history of the world to
> continue in their belief.  It is "the other side" who are
> scandalized that belief in evolution is not to be required
> by the State.  It seems, then, that the theocratic shoe is
> actually on the other foot in this case.

Concerning Carrol's question: when I was eight, in 1962, my parents
moved in the middle of the school year from Cleveland, Ohio, where I
never heard a word about the Bible in school, to Sarasota, Florida.  The
first day I went to class the teacher started off the day by commanding
us to rise and recite the hundred-and-something-th Psalm, whereupon the
entire class stood and chanted a long poem in Elizabethan English from
memory.  I was appalled; evidently I was expected to know over a hundred
of these things by heart, and the one I had just heard for the first
time was entirely incomprehensible.  That was about it for public school
religious training, however, and even that ceased after a year or two,
thanks to the Supreme Court. 

Concerning Kansas: Teaching so-called "creation science" legally opens
the door to teaching not just the theory of biological creation by an
act of Divine Will, but the entirety of fundamentalist Christianity to
students.  The obvious next question after, "Teacher, where did life
come from?" is "Teacher, if a supposedly benevolent 'God' created life,
then why is there such a thing as death?"  At that point the subject of
study leaps past the first dozen or so verses of Genesis to include the
whole of Old and New Testament moral and eschatolgical doctrine.  That's
what this Kansas business is all about, I think.

These last few years Kansas fundamentalists have been forbidden to teach
religion classes openly in their public schools; should they do so
anyway, they risk being sued by the ACLU, Barry Lynn's "Americans United
for Separation of Church and State," and similar groups.  But with this
new anti-evolution regulation, they can now sneak their religion classes
in the back door of the biology department.  Now whenever a Kansas
teacher lectures second-graders on the immortal verities of Biblical
morality as interpreted by the Revs. J. Falwell, J. Bakker, E. Ainsley,
P. Robertson, etc., and he gets sued for preaching fundamentalism to a
captive audience of public school children, the legal justification will
be that he is merely dealing, as per state law, with that part of the
biology curriculum concerned with theories of origin.

I'd bet anything reasonable (not a case of Lagavulin, that stuff's sixty
dollars a fifth!) that Sunday School in the public classrooms is right
around the corner in Kansas.

Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net