Weekend Open Thread

Welcome to your weekend open thread. The snow went away and then came back! Delaware’s football team fell asleep in the 4th quarter of the championship game and lost by 1 point. Strange weekend so far.

Bad Astronomy takes on an op-ed by Don McElroy, the former head of the Texas Board of Education. McElroy and his group of evangelicals took on changing history and science standards, like removing Jefferson from history and teaching creationism.

OK, here’s a fun sample of what McLeroy says:

New science standards were adopted in March 2009. […] The controversy over science standards was actually the result of an attempted hijacking of science for ideological purposes by evolutionists. Their agenda was much more about worldviews than biology. The standards reflect real science and challenge students to study some of evolution’s most glaring weaknesses in explaining the fossil record and the complexity of the cell.

Actually, it really was about biology, and how the conservative Board members kept trying to distort scientific reality. It was McLeroy and his cohorts who inserted worldviews into the standards; his and the Board majority’s extremely narrow and religious view of the world. This is a standard creationist tactic: accuse others of doing what you’re doing. By the way, those “glaring weaknesses” are nothing of the sort; the Board uses weasel words and language to make it seem like evolution is a weak idea, when in fact it is the very basis and unifying concept in modern biology.

Here’s another fun one:

One significant standard brings much needed clarity to the commonly misunderstood phrase “separation of church and state.” Our children will learn that it is not in the Constitution and, ironically, how it undermines the very language our Constitution uses to guarantee us religious liberty.

Technically, he’s correct that this phrase doesn’t appear in the Constitution. However, teaching kids that fact doesn’t really give them much insight into the First Amendment, which does actually guarantee that exact separation. And the irony is all him, since the phrase not only doesn’t undermine the Constitution, it’s one of the document’s major points. After all, the word “God” doesn’t appear anywhere in it, which would be an odd thing for a document to leave off if, in fact, the country’s laws were founded on religion. The point, totally lost on theocrats like McLeroy, is that by guaranteeing a freedom from government endorsement of religion, no one’s beliefs or lack thereof get infringed. I wonder how he’d feel if a Muslims gained a majority on the BoE and they started fiddling with the standards the way he did… oh wait, we know exactly how he’d feel.

Even conservative Texas was embarrassed by him. He lost his re-election and will be leaving the board. I guess textbooks are safe for now.

This story is the “I don’t think word means what you think it means file.” Rep. Steve King, who brought us the brilliant thinking of “garbage pail babies” accused Boehner of mendacity.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) literally accused the Republican leadership of the House of being a bunch of big old liars on the floor of the House last night. But that isn’t exactly what he meant.

During a rant on the floor of the House about health care, King used the word “mendacity” — meaning untruthfulness — where he likely meant the opposite.

“As I deliberate and I listen to the gentleman from Tennessee, I have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the leader or another member, there is an opportunity to rise to a point of order, there is an opportunity to make a motion to take the gentleman’s words down, however many of the members are off on other endeavors and I would make the point that the leader and the speaker have established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this Congress and I don’t believe it can be effectively challenged and those who do so actually cast aspersions on themselves by making wild accusations,” King said.

That’s what we call a gaffe – when a politician accidentally says the truth.