NRO‘s John Derbyshire has another bombastic blog post (“Governor Jindal, Veto This Bill!“), this time decrying the Louisiana Science Education Act.
According to Derb, “The act opens the door to the teaching of creationism in Louisiana public schools.” Of course, this is patently absurd. The bill says that students should be able to critically analyze scientific evidence regarding evolution, global warming, and human cloning; and secondly the bill says it should not be construed to promote religion (bear in mind that SCOTUS deemed creationism “religious” in 1987). This bill is about scientific evidence, whatever there may be, pro and con. No more no less.
Attempting to scare the promoters of this bill (which, BTW, just passed the LA House 94-3, with 35 co-sponsors), Derb claims that lawsuit is in the air. This too is misinformation. No state or school district which has adopted this middle-of-the-road, common-sense policy regarding the teaching of hot-potato scientific issues has ever been sued. What would the suit-bearers say? That hot-button scientific issues should be taught as unchanging dogma? That no critiques — no matter how scientific–deserve to be discussed?
With all due respect to our friends at NRO, how can they let Derb post information that can be shown false with a Google search? Derb has every right to criticize any bill he chooses–but he has no right to misrepresent it.