I know people who think Tennessee is a wonderful place. How much longer, though? Or is it a function of age? The Tennessee people I know are all older, with grown children. Would they be as fond of the place if they still had kids in school?
Tennessee is one of two states -- the other in Louisiana -- where there is a law allowing science teachers to throw actual science out the window and teach fairy tales instead. It may actually be the only state where an anti-bullying law makes bullying legal as long as the bully can claim that his religion says it's okay to persecute the victim.
In the science classroom, the idea is that teachers should be allowed to teach the "controversy" about evolution, climate change, and other subjects. So far as evolution is concerned, you'd have to ask why such a law would be needed. The only actual controversy about evolution is whether Gould's punctuated equilibrium idea or the older Darwinian gradualism is the correct mechanism. There's no controversy at all as to whether humans represent the current evolutionary level of our particular branch.
But the controversy that Tennessee and Louisiana want taught is the old argument between evolution and so-called Intelligent Design. It's a false controversy at best. Science supports evolution, and nothing at all supports ID, which is just the same old biblical creationism plastered over with a little new illogic, misinterpretations of legitimate science, and quite a lot of pseudo-science.
This sort of law is wasteful on several levels. It wastes the legislature's time, it wastes the state's money, and it wastes the time and efforts of students when it would be far better employed learning something useful. In the monetary area, it not only wastes money paying the salaries of the people who came up with this nonsense, but it also wastes the money that will be spent in a pointless effort to defend the law itself. ID is religious doctrine, with no science in it, so teaching it violates the establishment clause of the Bill of Rights. Several other states have already wasted a lot of taxpayer money defending this sort of nonsense. People were designed by an omniscient, omnipotent creator. If we were, obviously, we'd all remain young, vigorous, and completely healthy until we were about 95, then die painlessly in our sleep. Anyone claiming there was a designer is also going to have to admit that the designer was an incompetent boob.
The anti-bullying law is even stranger. I doubt you'll get anyone in the legislature to admit it, but the intent seems to be to insure that it remains legal for high school students to torture gay classmates by reminding them that they're going to spend eternity in a very unpleasant imaginary afterlife (as opposed to the much more pleasant imaginary afterlife the bully is expecting). I can see the law having unintended effects, for while Christians may be the majority, they're not the only religious nuts in Tennessee. How will the cheerleaders feel after being repeatedly harrassed and called prostitutes because they're not covering themselves with burkas? That would be legal, too.
And speaking of harrassment, Jessica Ahlquist is still getting death threats because she had the nerve to force her high school to remove an illegal banner from the auditorium. Or, more precisely, because she wanted them to remove the line that designated it a prayer, and a benedictary line at the end. Most of it was just a collection of non-religious, positive thinking platitudes that no one would have cared about. The letter that was released a couple days ago has the appearance of having been composed by a particularly nasty middle school student, but the content violates any number of criminal statutes. It also provides a good reminder that the only reason Christians stopped killing anyone who disagreed with them is because they now live under secular governments that won't let them. Otherwise, you'd just have the Pilgrim Fathers, whose idea of religious liberty included the persecution and murder of anyone who didn't believe in their particular Calvinistic interpretation of Christianity.
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