Think Progress reports on a Missouri School District that forced its marching band to return T-shirts it ordered. The T-Shirt’s design is depicted below.
The reason?
Assistant superintendent Brad Pollitt explained that the t-shirts were banned because they were imposing on religious views:
Though the shirts don’t violate the school’s dress code, Pollitt noted that the district is required by law to remain neutral on religion.
“If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections’ and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing,” Pollitt said.
Now, most likely this is just another example of school administrators following the path of least resistance. The fundamentalists will stand up and scream but the rationalist can usually be counted on to keep discretely silent. In this country, it’s considered unseemly to openly advocate for reason.
But it’s always possible that Mr. Pollitt actually believes he is being neutral on religion, which means that he thinks that evolution is a religious faith. It follows, then, that all of science is merely a religious faith, and that we can no longer safely assert in the public schools that the planets go around the sun, that the earth is round, or that the moon is not made of green cheese.
In point of fact, this is not neutrality on religion, this is an establishment of religion, since it basically holds that the public school will not allow recognition of any fact which contradicts any article of faith, no matter how absurd that faith may be. There’s a good article here pointing out that a) almost every religion believes some arrant nonsense that science has proven to be false, and b) that it is highly unlikely that Mr. Pollitt would have felt any need to be neutral between scientific fact and lunatic beliefs held by non-Christians (thus proving my point that this action is really an establishment of religion, specifically the totally ignorant variant of the Christian religion).
We are truly an ignorant nation.
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