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Monkey Trial II: Tenn. House Passes Bill Permitting Teachers To Teach The “Controversy” Over Evolution

Submitted by Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

Legendary actor Spencer Tracy Crosses Frederick March in "Inherit the Wind"
I guess it takes a few whacks to get things into the heads of the theocrats in Tennessee.  Eighty-six years after the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” pitted Clarence Darrow, Esq., against William Jennings Bryan, Esq., in a classic cross-examination of opposing counsel that decimated the notion that teaching creationism was anything except the indoctrination of religion by public school officials, Tennessee legislators are at it again with a new version of the Butler Act. 

Feigning that some controversy actually exists over the fact of evolution, the Rocky Toppers have decided to grant job protection to teachers who choose to criticize the scientific doctrine. To be quite proper, they have inserted language that stipulates that “this section only protects the teaching of scientific information, and shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine.”  But  Becky Ashe, the president of the Tennessee Science Teachers Association, is not fooled. She told a subcommittee of the Tennessee House that the Bill “is an anti-evolutionary attempt to allow non-scientific alternatives to evolution (such as creationism and intelligent design) to be introduced into our public schools.”

Seems the famous trial and the movie version (“Inherit The Wind”) are always on the minds of  theocrats. Tennessee State Representative Richard Floyd (R) even alluded to them in the floor debate commenting that “since the late ’50s, early ’60s when we let the intellectual bullies hijack our education system, we’ve been on a slippery slope.” Aptly named Republican Sheila Butt even found a way to criticize environmentalists in the debate saying she was told in high school that Aqua Net hair spray hurts the environment. In a conclusion worthy of mention she added, “Since then scientists have said that maybe we shouldn’t have given up that aerosol can because that aerosol can was actually absorbing the Earth’s rays and keeping us from global warming.” Ah, the joys of anti-intellectualism.

The Bill passed the House 70-23 and now goes to the Senate. Hopefully, they reached a stage of high intellectual evolution.

Source: TPM

~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

239 thoughts on “Monkey Trial II: Tenn. House Passes Bill Permitting Teachers To Teach The “Controversy” Over Evolution”

  1. If education were free of state control, people could send their children where they thought best.

    Public schools encourage herd thinking and sameness.

  2. Jefferson also says this:

    “that even the forcing
    him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty
    of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers
    he feels most persuasive to righteousness; and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporal[ry] rewards,
    which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest
    and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our
    religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”

    Seems to me you could make an argument for the defunding of a public school which doesn’t permit a person to worship as they see fit. Since people who believe in a Sky Daddy have rights too.

  3. If people want to believe in a Sky Daddy, it is their right. However clueless you may think they are.

    “Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence
    proposed to their minds; that [Whereas,] Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his
    supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to
    influence by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy
    and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord
    both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to
    do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone, that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers,
    civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion
    over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible,
    and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over
    the greatest part of the world through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for
    the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical…”
    The Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious
    Freedom

    Works in Tennessee as well.

  4. “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

    Ever read the 4th Antimony Buddha?

  5. Yeah.

    Let’s not let pesky facts get in the way.

    Like physical evidence of speciation in existent divergent but related populations.

    Like physical evidence of past speciation from the fossil record.

    Like advances in molecular genetics that allow for precise tracking of gene changes over time.

    Evolution is a group of facts gathered under one rubric called a theory only because it has areas of study that are incomplete, not that the whole of the area of study is theoretical or untrue. Evolution is a factual, demonstrable and measurable process within existent populations of animals and plants.

    The only way one’s conscience could conclude that facts verifiable by empirical testable evidence are false when the evidence says they are true is if one’s conscience is in either deliberate or unconscious denial in furtherance of wishful thinking that “Sky Daddy” is going to come to one’s rescue. Wishful thinking is not reality. Evolution is reality.

    Allowing for the teaching of “intelligent design” or “creationism” is as large a disservice to children as teaching them that the boogie man under their bed is real. If your conscience requires deception to yourself and others, it’s not much of a conscience and/or it is a delusion based upon falsehood.

  7. marc sobel:

    good idea, teach it all. explore all the variables and the history of evolution. What are the pros and cons of each theory and why evolution is the better model.

    Let people make up their own minds, and believe or not believe by the dictate of their own conscience.

  8. I think you could do a good lesson plan on teaching the controversy,

    I) Danbury Baptists, Jefferson and REYNOLDS v. UNITED STATES
    I) Kansas Board of Education and the Flying Spaghetti Monster
    III) Dover decision

  9. These teabaggers and Republicans that have suddenly (and tragically) been given a bit of authority through being elected to office are like little children on a sugar high. They’re bouncing uncontrollably off the walls of various state legislatures and statehouses flailing and grasping at every opportunity to behave badly. They obviously know they’re only going to get one shot at destroying America before the electorate wakes up and kicks them to the curb, so any and every insane idea that’s every crossed their little kid brain becomes fodder for more of their mindless shenanigans. They provide a disgusting collective display of the lowest depths of America’s mean side and a serious lack of intelligence.

  14. AN,

    I wake up just to annoy… Buddha of course lives to be of service… or at least I was informed of this a few years ago…

  16. No Anon Nurse….Not enough whacks….Not enough….I am not intimating the John Gotti School of Discipline….but something in between….

  20. “when we let the intellectual bullies hijack our education system”

    Works on so many levels.

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