Eighty-seven years after Tennessee was nationally embarrassed for criminally prosecuting the teaching of evolution, the state government is at it again. This time it has enacted a law that protects teachers who invite students to challenge the science underlying evolution and climate change. The measure is a transparent invitation to indulge pseudoscience in the classroom and a transparent pandering to a vocal, conservative fringe.
Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, wrung his hands, warning that good legislation should bring “clarity and not confusion.” But he allowed the bill to pass into law without his signature in the face of the Republican-dominated Legislature’s three-to-one support of the measure.
Sponsors denied the obvious — that the law was a cover to make it easier to raise creationism and intelligent design as alternatives to evolution and to billboard conservative propaganda against the evidence of climate change. No, the law invites better “critical thinking,” proponents said, by protecting teachers from administrative discipline when they help students critique what the law terms the strengths and “scientific weaknesses” of topics that “cause controversy” such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”
Thousands of scientists, educators and civil libertarians in Tennessee petitioned the governor to veto, warning that the law was an exercise in miseducation and a retreat to the antiscience and religious boosterism that scarred the 1925 trial of the schoolteacher John Scopes. Scopes presented an enduring lesson in the importance of standing up for science and the truth. It is amazing that so many politicians have still not figured that out.
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