Thanks Mike! You're the best! --BG, 10/9/08
*****
When you're trying to force your beliefs on others, the best way to do it is with an agenda based on throwing everything possible against the wall, in the hopes that something--anything--will stick. It's a desperate and pathetic attempt to institutionalize ignorance.
...a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. None of them are “creationism” or “intelligent design” or even “creator.”
The words are “strengths and weaknesses.”
Starting this summer, the state education board will determine the curriculum for the next decade and decide whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution should be taught. The benign-sounding phrase, some argue, is a reasonable effort at balance. But critics say it is a new strategy taking shape across the nation to undermine the teaching of evolution, a way for students to hear religious objections under the heading of scientific discourse.
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.
There certainly are "strengths and weaknesses" to any argument, but if you want your children to be exposed to ideology, not information, and if you want to see more school districts humiliated and run into the ground, then the "strengths and weaknesses" crowd is the place to be. At some point, we'll get past this nonsense and look back on these times as the last gasp of a n ideologically-driven foray into an outdated mindset that is terrified of being exposed as hypocritical.
You'll never hear these people debate the "strengths and weaknesses" of abstinence only education, for example.
--WS
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