August 10th, 2011
By |
Politics/Issues |
Posted In: School Board, Courts, Religion, Public Policy
ACLU Warns Springboro
School officials in a suburb north of Cincinnati are being warned not to add creationism to their curriculum if they want to avoid a costly legal challenge.
The ACLU of Ohio recently sent a letter to the Springboro Community City School District stating that the teaching of creationism in public schools is both unconstitutional and unscientific. During the past several decades, the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts have consistently found that teaching creationism, intelligent design, or other religious-based ideologies unfairly promote one belief system over others, the letter added.
Some Springboro school board members have said they're interested in exploring ways to integrate creationism into the school’s curriculum. Supporters of the plan say it's permissible because it wouldn't be a required course, merely a supplemental course that could be taken as an elective.
That still doesn't pass legal muster, the ACLU said.
“The ACLU has a long history of defending everyone’s right to practice the religion of their choice, or none at all,” said James Hardiman, the ACLU of Ohio's legal director, in a prepared statement. “However, if public schools begin to teach a religious ideology as scientific fact, it sends a message that the school supports that religion over others. Preferential treatment makes all people less free to hold their own beliefs.”
If the school district doesn't prevail in the court challenge, the ACLU added, it would be responsible for paying all legal costs in the case.
“School officials could find much better uses for its resources than passing an unconstitutional policy that flies in the face of their mission to educate young people and perpetuates the myth that religion and science cannot coexist,” Hardiman said. “Evolutionary theory and religion need not be opposed to one another.”
In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Edwards v. Aguillard case that teaching creationism in public schools violated the U.S. Constitution. In December 2005, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that intelligent design, a new ideology promoted as a scientific alternative to evolution, was no different than creationism.
Additionally, scientists have nearly universally dismissed these theories as unverifiable, the ACLU noted.
Springboro is located 40 miles north of Cincinnati, and sits in portions of Warren and Montgomery counties.
Actually the Discovery Institute, the leading ID "think" tank, and a group that can hardly be described as "left winged ideologues" claims that ID is correct and evolution wrong, so obviously they believe they're incompatible as well.
But yes, of course they're incompatible, unless the intelligent creator just assembled the original chemicals and then let everything alone to evolve as it would. If someone who believes that can find some evidence to back it up, they should do so, otherwise it's just a strange form of wishful thinking.
"There is no evidence of IC anywhere"................................ Yep, that's what liberal fanatics who deny, suppress, willfully ignore, and downplay the significance of evidence like to claim, all right, but that has nothing to do with science or the actual evidence and how it gets inteerpreted. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid, lib.
"island" replied to CRW: "Yep, that's what liberal fanatics who deny, suppress, willfully ignore, and downplay the significance of evidence like to claim, all right, but that has nothing to do with science or the actual evidence and how it gets inteerpreted. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid, lib."........................................................................
This is where the lib typically comes in and asks, "What evidence?"... which would be fine except that they will then proceed to deny, suppress, willfully ignore, and downplay the significance of any evidence that gets presented, even if it is the authoritative opinion of experts in one or more of the relevant fields of study.
This only serves to betray the fanatic's true motivation which is their religion, known begrudgingly to physicists as, "Copernicanism", which is the unsupported belief that our existence is ultimately meaningless, irrespective of any evidence that may run contrary to their ideologically affected belief system. They are no different than fundamentalists, and this is the reason why ID needs to get pushed, not because it's any more correct than the "neo" darwininan interpretations.
As time went on and more fossils were found, it was easy to see that Piltdown man simply didn't fit, and eventually it was examined thoroughly in the light of new knowledge and discovered to be a hoax. That's how science works – by learning. The same of true of Newtonian physics, except you are implying that they are wrong; they're not, they just don't apply when approaching the speed of light. Science learns, and the more it learns the more it *can* learn. It isn't a case of "Science thought this yesterday and thinks this today so science is stupid." It's a case of learning.