Academic "freedom"

A hero of mine, Dr. Eugenie Scott, heads up the National Center for Science Education, and fights endlessly to let teachers teach science without religious and political influence.  She was interviewed by Paul Fidalgo for Skeptical Inquirer about a bill in Tennessee that would direct teachers to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of such "controversial subjects" as evolution and climate change.

Having morphed from creation science to intelligent design, which were recognized by the courts as attempts to inject religion into public school science teaching, the proponents have learned to completely leave religion out of the argument and to try other tactics.  Says Dr. Scott:

Actually, this is not your grandfather's creationism.  We have been tracking these "Academic Freedom Act" types of bills since about 2004, and they do provide a somewhat different approach than what was going on in Dover, Pennsylvania.

The Tennessee bill is worrisome because it so carefully avoids religion; it never mentions creationism or intelligent design.  The approach is to treat evolution (and global warming and the other laundry list of subjects) as "controversial subjects" that need to be singled out for special treatment in the curriculum.  Teachers are directed to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of the subjects, as if they were topics that were of questionable validity in science.  They may be controversial to the general public, but they are certainly not controversial among scientists.

The careful avoidance of any reference to religion makes these bills more difficult to challenge on constitutional grounds.  They also are difficult to challenge because they invoke cultural values like fairness and freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Well, now.  If a legislature directs teachers to teach in a certain way, how in the world is that academic freedom?  Case closed.

 

 

Getting America's attention

We've got it pretty good in this country, and most of us are content, and busy.  Busy making money, busy falling in love, busy with all our various distractions.  There are over 300 million of us, living our busy lives, and it takes a long time to get the whole country's attention when something is amiss.

I've been worrying and going on about neoconservatives and Teabaggers for a long time.  There are others like me, and we tend to get ignored because we're perceived as people who complain too much; and the more we're ignored, the more worried we get, and that makes us talk all the more.

The complainers on my side of the political spectrum have become alarmed about the complainers on the other end, who have made noises about revolting if the next election doesn't go their way.  We're alarmed that the Republican Party has been taken over by people who are ignorant, and who laud ignorance.  Today's Republican Party is in the difficult position of having to disguise their agenda because so much of it is unpopular with people when it is spelled out to them.

If you ask people if they prefer Obama's programs or Romney's, a certain number of the respondents will say Romney's.  But when you ask them about individual questions without mentioning which candidate espouses them, a much lower number of people choose Romney's programs.  Clearly, many people don't study the issues much.  They're too busy to really pay attention.

Now, there are people on the far right, as we know, who want to dismantle the New Deal completely.  They want to privatize Social Security and end Medicare.  There are people on the far right who actually want our children taught that slavery wasn't so bad.  As I have mentioned before, once upon a time, conservatives would have been happy if the government would stop giving handouts to the unemployed; now the Teabaggers are against helping the poor even if they are working.  Once upon a time, the pro-life movement would have been happy to stop abortion; now they are attacking all forms of birth control.

The Republican Party knows that the things they believe in are unpopular if they are understood properly.  So they're running a sort of stealth campaign.  They want their programs passed even if the populace doesn't like those programs.  However, recent statements by some of the most extreme Republicans may have shaken the nation awake.

Todd Akin, Republican candidate for the Senate from Missouri has come under fire for saying that women's bodies can naturally prevent pregnancy by a rapist.  Their fear of this traumatic event, Mr. Akin claims, causes some sort of chemical change in their bodies that keeps them from getting pregnant.  Now, I don't know if Akin really believes this, although he probably does, but he's not a lone ignoramus.  This belief is widespread among pro-lifers who want abortion banned with no exceptions.  If they don't believe in pregnancy by rape, they don't have to worry about the exception.

The nastiest part of this, of course, is that if a woman is raped and gets pregnant, it's proof that she wanted it.

This story has gotten a lot of attention, and I think it may have alerted the sleepier members of the population that there is madness afoot.  Perhaps the electorate will begin to pay attention to what the candidates believe in.  For that, we can thank the overreach of the Teabaggers.

Faith in...?

On the way home, I passed a church with a nice big sign with the message, "Faith is trusting God, even when questions go unanswered."

That's the problem with faith.  Theologians and Sunday school classes wrestle with reality, in a literal sense.  They look at the world around them, and find convoluted ways to convince themselves that faith is warranted, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Faith in what, anyway?  That in spite of all their troubles, there is a loving God who cares for them?  Or that after their hard travails on earth, God will take care of them at last, leading them to heaven?

A friend of mine came down with a mysterious-sounding disease, some sort of infection of the spine.  She was out of work for months, and we wondered if she would ever recover.  Finally, she did, and on returning to work, she was aglow, and said to me, "To God goes the glory!"

One often sees news stories of devastation from natural disasters, homes destroyed, loss of life, and in the middle of the ruins of a home, the owner will say, "God is merciful.  Praise the Lord!"  Naturally, the person is happy to be alive, but what about all the others who aren't?  What about the bringer of the destruction?

And prayer is the most unpredictable of endeavors.  Whenever someone becomes deathly ill, their friends pray for them.  Sometimes they get well, sometimes they don't.  When they do, God is praised.  When they don't, the rationalizations begin.  (And as we know from an earlier lesson, God is unable or unwilling to regrow severed limbs, casting suspicion on all the other things prayer is given credit for healing.)

The believers go on trying to make sense of it, to convince themselves of God's goodness in the face of misery.

I don't believe in God, but if I'm wrong and there is one, It (how could we know if It had any gender or any kind of human attributes?), on the basis of what we see around us, is surely the most impersonal of beings.  We live in a beautiful world, an abundant world, but none of us knows that some accident or illness or other disaster won't snuff us out an instant from now.

Of course, we're grateful every moment we're alive, but I wouldn't bother this God about it, because It is not paying attention.

Mustarjil

If you read widely enough, you're bound to find things that surprise you.  To the best of my knowledge, homosexuality is a crime in most Muslim countries, in some countries punishable by death.

So it came as a surprise to me that, in practice, in at least one place, there was sympathy for people who felt that they were born the wrong sex.

This passage, from The Marsh Arabs, by Wilfred Thesiger, was published in 1964.  The marsh Arabs were people who lived in the marshes of Iraq before Saddam Hussein drained those marshes to drive out the Shia Muslims who lived there.

One afternoon, some days after leaving Dibin, we arrived at a village on the mainland.  The sheikh was away looking at his cultivations, but we were shown to his mudhif by a boy wearing a head-rope and cloak, with a dagger at his waist.  He looked about fifteen and his beautiful face was made even more striking by two long braids of hair on either side.  In the past all the Madan wore their hair like that, as the Bedu still did.  After the boy had made us coffee and withdrawn, Amara asked, "Did you realize that was a mustarjil?"  I had vaguely heard of them, but had not met one before.

"A mustarjil is born a woman," Amara explained.  "She cannot help that; but she has the heart of a man, so she lives like a man."

"Do men accept her?"

"Certainly.  We eat with her and she may sit in the mudhif.  When she dies, we fire off our rifles to honour her.  We never do that for a woman.  In Majid's village there is one who fought bravely in the war against Haji Sulaiman."

"Do they always wear their hair plaited?"

"Usually they shave it off like men."

"Do mustarjils ever marry?"

"No, they sleep with women as we do."

Once, however, we were in a village for a marriage, when the bride, to everyone's amazement, was in fact a mustarjil.  In this case she had agreed to wear women's clothes and to sleep with her husband on condition that he never asked her to do women's work.  The mustarjils were much respected, and their nearest equivalent seemed to be the Amazons of antiquity.  I met a number of others during the following years.  One man came to me with what I took for his twelve-year-old son, suffering from colic, but when I wanted to examine the child, the father said, "He is a mustarjil."

...

Previously, while staying with Hamud, Majid's brother, I was sitting in the diwaniya when a stout, middle-aged woman shuffled in, enveloped in the usual black draperies, and asked for treatment.  She had a striking, rather masculine face, and lifting her skirt exposed a perfectly normal full-sized male organ.  "Will you cut this off and make me into a proper woman?" he pleaded.  I had to confess that the operation was beyond me.  When he had left, Amara asked compassionately, "Could they not do it for him in Basra?  Except for that, he really is a woman, poor thing."

So there is some wiggle room for people who are different.  All that said, it is a shame that normal women are treated so badly under Islam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NBC: How about a little respect for sports and sports fans?

Let me start by saying that I know that commercial television has to have commercials.  I grew up with commercial TV, and I survived, and I know that TV has to have an income stream.  But in their zeal for satisfying their obligations to their sponsors, they sometimes don't think enough about the integrity of their entertainment product.

Take, for example, the Olympic Games.  I hope that not too many readers lose interest when I say that I am a distance running enthusiast.  I'm not really interested in the sprints; races 800 meters or longer get my attention, though.  So it irks me when, in the course of the 5,000 meter race, which takes less than fifteen minutes to run, there are at least two commercial breaks.  Now, I don't begrudge the network their commercials in the 10,000 meter or the marathon, because, by golly, that's a long time to go without selling something.  But the number of breaks is, I think, excessive.

While we're at it, something else really got me shouting at the TV during the women's marathon.  Not content to interrupt that race only for commercials, they also ran little featurettes during the race.  (They didn't do this during the men's marathon, presumably because the Olympics were just about over.)  Such unnecessary intrusions are disrespectful to the viewers, and especially, in this case, to the women running the race.

Anyway, after my complaining about the placement of commercials and their detrimental effect on my enjoyment of the sporting events, there's a punchline!

Last night, I watched the closing ceremonies (which were something like a cross between MOULIN ROUGE and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade).  I wasn't too interested in the ceremonies, but I wanted to see The Who.  Before every commercial break, Ryan Seacrest would say, "We'll be back with more, including The Who!"  But as eleven o'clock approached, there seemed less and less time for the headliners.  (At this point you can call me a fool for not checking the program guide more carefully, but no matter.)

Then, at 10:58, Bob Costas announced, "Later on tonight, we'll be back with The Who, but first, we'll broadcast the first episode of the new comedy, 'Animal Practice,' WITHOUT COMMERCIAL INTERRUPTION!"

Oh, NBC, thank you, thank you, for the gift.

David Barton again

David Barton, you may recall, is the guy who will use any trick in the book to try to prove that the Founding Fathers wanted the USA to be a Christian nation.  He was a favorite on the Glenn Beck TV show.  His historical method mostly consists of out-of-context quotation and misinterpretation of bits of quotes.  He claims to have voluminous primary evidence, but hasn't shown a lot of it to other historians.

In the past, when his work was debunked, his response was to say that the debunkers had a liberal, secular bias, and therefore couldn't be trusted.  But his new book, "The Jefferson Lies" (an unintentionally funny title, in my opinion), the first of his books to be published by a company other that Barton's own WallBuilders, has been unfavorably reviewed by other conservative historians.  There have been enough substantive complaints about the book that the publisher, Thomas Nelson, Inc., has withdrawn it from the stores.

A recent negative review of the book was written by Steven Green who, despite being Director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University (a school founded by Methodist missionaries), will probably not be deemed by Barton and his supporters as conservative enough or religious enough to be trustworthy.  First of all Dr. Green just has too many degrees, and therefore must be a member of the club that won't let David Barton in.  Second, Dr. Green, a Christian, also believes in the separation of church and state.

Green points out that, in the new book, Barton takes a different tack from his previous ones.

Most likely, Barton seeks to reach a mainstream audience with "The Jefferson Lies" unlike the audience of his earlier works, one that lacks a predisposition toward a Christian nationalism perspective.  Not only has Barton's tone moderated, so too have some of his claims.  Unlike his earlier works where Barton characterized separation of church and state  as a false concept that has contributed to the nation's moral decay, he now embraces a modified version of the concept, one that promotes religious values.  It is as if Barton has realized that he can advance his perspective more effectively through stealth and subtlety, rather than through confrontational polemics.

Reading that paragraph, I zeroed in on the words "stealth and subtlety," which I recognize from so many other right-wing intellectual pursuits, including their attempts to cloak religious beliefs as science. When their arguments are debunked, as they always are, they rewrite the same arguments with new terminology.

Again it occurs to me to wonder whether these people have, at some level, a recognition that they are lying in order to convince others of what they believe.  And if so, if the only way to defend their position is by trickery, mustn't what they are defending be false?

In any case, I can imagine David Barton's believers thinking that, in the face of criticism from these unexpected quarters, that the insidious infiltration by the evil forces of liberal secularism must be worse and more widespread than they ever imagined!  My God, they've gotten to the religious conservatives!

Limits of liberty

That headline is gonna scare the Libertarians.  Boo!  I don't care.

In the wake of all the latest mass shootings, those who want to ban assault weapons note that, after a single Muslim terrorist made his shoes into bombs, anyone who gets on a plane has to take off his or her shoes while going through security.  They wonder why, after so many mass shootings, we don't seem to take *that* problem seriously enough to do a single thing about it.

Second Amendment absolutists might argue that the Constitution doesn't guarantee us the right to wear shoes.  That would be true, but not helpful.

I had more or less made up my mind, as a lover of the Bill of Rights, to shut up about the Second Amendment, troublesome as it is.  But it occurs to me that common sense dictates limitations to our rights under the other amendments.  I would consider myself more dedicated to the First Amendment than the average citizen, but even so, I recognize libel and slander as harmful things that are rightfully exceptions to our freedom of speech.

If there are limits to the rights granted by the other amendments, why not the Second?