Part 2
It’s interesting that while Discovery Institute earnestly stressed that nothing about the legislation was religiously motivated, the lead sponsor of the LSEA, Senator Ben Nevers, saw it differently.
“The Louisiana Family Forum suggested the bill,” Nevers told the Hammond Daily Star at the time. “They believe that scientific data related to creationism should be discussed when dealing with Darwin’s theory.”
The Louisiana Family Forum, which helped DI lobby for LSEA, is affiliated with Focus on the Family and is dedicated to “persuasively present(ing) biblical principles in the centers of influence on issues affecting the family through research, communication and networking.”
Also, Louisiana Family Forum has been trying to get straight-up creationism into public schools as recently as 2004.
Until recently, the fight following the bill’s approval has been over how the wording will be implemented and to develop a review process to make sure those “supplemental materials” aren’t just intelligent design books—like the latest version of Pandas and People.
LSEA says that
“a teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, as permitted by the city, parish, or other local public school board unless otherwise prohibited by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.”
Which appears to give school districts a lot of room to introduce creationist texts.
Yes, Disingenuous
Last month, the Livingston Parish decided to hold off on introducing creationism into biology class for the current school year. But it has appointed a staff committee to look at ways to introduce it for the 2011-12 school year.
So it’s a bit early at this point to speculate whether Louisiana and the Livingston Parish School District will be the site of the next constitutional test case of the Discovery Institute’s latest brand of creationism.
But the echoes of Dover are certainly interesting.
Meanwhile, Chapman and others are still denying that they’re trying to force religion into public school science class.
If Chapman had written a piece in which he owned up to DI’s old ways, repented for all the lies that its fellows have told over the years in Jesus’ name about their true purpose, if he said from now on, they would be focused on actually doing real scientific research, I might be a little more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But Chapman didn’t do that. Instead, he’s making the same disingenuous remarks that Discovery Institute folks have been making since its inception.
