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Here is a letter we can sign that will ask the Governor of LA to veto SB 733, a vile piece of legislation that is seeking to advance the Discovery Institutes' "Wedge Theory" by polluting public schools with fairy tale thinking.

The letter can be read and signed here:

http://lasciencecoalition.org/

And here is a little tidbit from the Discovery Institute and their "Wedge Theory"

Like I've said, these are scary times we are living in.

antievolution.org wrote:Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies...we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points...

5 Year Objectives: An active design movement in Israel, the UK and other influential countries outside the US
Ten CRSC Fellows teaching at major universities
Two universities where design theory has become the dominant view
Design becomes a key concept in the social sciences Legal reform movements base legislative proposals on design theory

And while you're at it, stop legitimizing homosexual behavior, planned parenthood, and socialism in the schools too please. Even better, abolish the public school system altogether.

bcspace wrote:And while you're at it, stop legitimizing homosexual behavior, planned parenthood, and socialism in the schools too please. Even better, abolish the public school system altogether.

What legislation are you speaking of (this is rhetorical, of course. There is no such legislation in the works) ?

bcspace wrote:Even better, abolish the public school system altogether.

Finally, someone talking sense. Abolish government-sponsored daycare.

The Nehor wrote:

bcspace wrote:Even better, abolish the public school system altogether.

Finally, someone talking sense. Abolish government-sponsored daycare.

I thought it was more of a government-sponsored assylum. I know I did some crazy stuff at school (like steal my French-teacher's dolls, take pictures of them all around SLC, and then write ransom notes).

The Discovery Institute has been pushing its "Academic Freedom" bills in state legislatures throughout the country. This is the strategy they began pushing since the Ohio battle and have been vigorously pursuing since the Dover defeat. The goal now is to teach traditional ID/creationist criticisms/mischaracterizations of evolution along with standard biology while no longer making the explicit conclusion, "therefore creator." If you look at the material they have produced waiting in the wings, they're still pretty ham-handed with the way they imply design while stopping just short of where they were before their last round of legal defeats. It's going to pass somewhere. It'll be shot down by the courts, eventually, so long as the religious right doesn't get another 2 or so justices on the Supreme Court.

Jindal explicitly supports teaching Intelligent Design-Creationism in schools along side evolution (the two models argument) along with the majority of LA, so it's basically a lock for him to sign this.

EAllusion wrote:The Discovery Institute has been pushing its "Academic Freedom" bills in state legislatures throughout the country. This is the strategy they began pushing since the Ohio battle and have been vigorously pursuing since the Dover defeat. The goal now is to teach traditional ID/creationist criticisms/mischaracterizations of evolution along with standard biology while no longer making the explicit conclusion, "therefore creator." If you look at the material they have produced waiting in the wings, they're still pretty ham-handed with the way they imply design while stopping just short of where they were before their last round of legal defeats. It's going to pass somewhere. It'll be shot down by the courts, eventually, so long as the religious right doesn't get another 2 or so justices on the Supreme Court.

The Dude has presented elsewhere a superb example of the ham-handedness of the effort to cloak, for example, a Creationism textbook in the trappings of ID. I don't remember the details, but perhaps he can post it again. It involved some less-than-thorough copying and pasting in whatever word processing program the editor(s) was using.

(Full disclosure: I wouldn't mind at all if ID were taught in schools.)

Chris

The LA Coalition for Science is Barbara Forrest's group, incidentally. She is more responsible than any other one person for the beatdown the IDists received in Dover.

cksalmon wrote:
The Dude has presented elsewhere a superb example of the ham-handedness of the effort to cloak, for example, a Creationism textbook in the trappings of ID. I don't remember the details, but perhaps he can post it again. It involved some less-than-thorough copying and pasting in whatever word processing program the editor(s) was using.

Well, the progressive creationists just basically relabeled their views "Intelligent Design" in the wake of the Supreme Court defeat in '87. The Dude likely showed you how the drafts of Of Pandas and People were rewritten to scrub creationism and its cognates for Design and its.

Here's how the new strategy will go down:

http://www.exploreevolution.com/pdf/pee ... _30-31.pdf

They'll do things like discuss how evolutionary theory can't account for lungs, then provide an exercise for students where they build their own lung. They don't come out and say lungs were designed, but you have to be pretty dense not to realize what they are doing.