Since I somewhat regularly bash the Southern states, bastions of ignorance that they are, it’s only fair that I make note of hopeful signs from that portion of our country that, generally speaking, keeps us in thrall to superstition.
A federal court has upheld the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s decision to deny accreditation to the Institute for Creation Research’s proposed graduate school’s science program, on the what appears to have been extremely politely expressed grounds that they were perfectly entitled to teach religion, but they couldn’t call it science.
Via the Panda’s Thumb:
The Institute for Creation Research has apparently closed its graduate school after being denied the authority to offer a master’s degree in science education. See the concession by Henry Morris III. The National Center for Science Education reports, however, that the ICR is opening instead a School of Biblical Apologetics, which will offer a master’s degree in Christian education, as well as a minor in creation research. The graduate school may be exempt from licensing requirements as long as it offers purely religious degrees.
Pity the poor lawyers trying to make a coherent case for the ICRG. This portion of the court’s ruling exemplifies the difficulties that they must have had. The court is discussing the Institute’s claim that the Board was discriminating against it on religious grounds:
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Because ICRGS alternates between arguing it is merely teaching science and arguing its program is compelled by its religious beliefs, the Court is at a loss to determine what portion of ICRGS’s behavior should be considered motivated by its religious beliefs. And although its pleadings and various documents in the record (such as the report of the review panel) contain third-person references to ICRGS’s religious beliefs, the Court has no actual evidence (such as an affidavit) of what those beliefs are and to what extent they motivate ICRGS in offering the degree in question. Without any evidence of ICRGS’s specific religious beliefs and what it considers its religiously-motivated behavior, the Court is entirely unable to conduct an inquiry into whether the government action has created a substantial burden on ICRGS’s free exercise by “truly pressur[ing] [ICRGS] to significantly modify [it]s religious behavior and significantly violate [it]s religious beliefs.” Barr, 295 S.W.3d at 301-02.
Talk about trying to have it both ways.
In any event, three cheers for the Board for standing up for science. Before we give too much credit to Texas, however, we must recall that the Board’s original ruling was rendered in 2008, meaning Rick Perry has had two years to try to destroy this island of sanity in an ocean of ignorance (this is the state, remember, that is on a campaign to pervert primary and secondary education in the name of religion and conservatism).
