Why not just give up and let them? Natural selection will then take over with the more intelligent parents leaving the State, so in 20 years or so when the economy has tanked it can be recolonised cheaply.
[edit - this is in the spirit of Swift’s ironic “Modest proposal”, I don’t really mean mean it. No pasaran!]
[edit 2-
The simple anti-evolution mob have acquired a new more subtle variant.
Recently I was in a meeting and afterwards was talking to a recently retired academic, an economist. I was asked, quite seriously, whether I agreed that we have enough science nowadays - we don’t need any more so we should stop spending money on fundamental research and spend it on education in literature, history and geography to produce a better educated and thus more progressive society.
I’m afraid the weather being experienced on the Eastern Seaboard of the US may be the result of arctic air rushing in to fill the vacuum as my jaw hit the floor.
Very weakly, instead of saying “You should try that on someone who doesn’t know how little we know about a lot of important things” I merely remarked that we must agree to differ and moved on. But I did wonder if this was the same anti-science crap but with a new spin to take the obvious agenda off the table.]
Because the students who are taught the “controversy” will grow up to vote. No student, no matter how fundamentalist and fucked up their parents are, should have to go through life poorly educated, especially if they’re going to make adult decisions that affect other people.
The bill responds to that uncertainty by ensuring educators can just teach whatever they want as long as they think it’s science, and nobody can discipline them.
This is why there’s a curriculum. Teachers can’t “just teach whatever they want.” They have to teach true things.
Students, meanwhile, cannot be penalized if they “subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories.”
Not even if that position is false? Forget evolution, suppose a student hands in a paper that says the moon is made of green cheese. Is the teacher forbidden to grade that paper?
But there’s no science backing this up… it has to be proven via scientific method.
Oh, or mentioned in the Bible.
Not at all. The law only says the student has to “subscribe to the belief.” It says nothing about the scientific method.
The Quran says there are eleven planets, not counting the Earth, which is flat, and orbited by the sun. Suppose a student subscribes to fundamentalist Islam?
Jesus did NOT walk around with a tricorn hat & eating a corndog with a gun and the dinosaurs.
But the problem is that a bill that becomes successful will then propagate and invade other, less robust eco-legal systems that have not evolved defenses against it.
No, but he did bring the Constitution down to us carved in stone tablets from Mt. Rushmore riding a raptor. 
Oh, I know that, cuz I was there.
I used to wonder how it was possible for people in the Dark Ages to put up with willful, intentional ignorance. How could people ignore the obvious. It finally dawns on me that there are multitudes of people who crave the ignorant bliss fed to them by the priests and other keepers of the word. Its so easy not to think, so comfortable to have the “truth” handed to you without a single bit of intellectual discomfort. …god said it, I believe it, that’s the end of it. We’re still in the grips of the Dark Ages. Perhaps its simply the nature of mankind to seek the simple comfort of letting someone else make all of the important decisions in our lives while we decide what media teat to suck for the day, what restaurant to feed us and how to minimize our children’s exposure to unsettling ideas.
Sez you.
not pictured: hat, gun and corndog
Wow, So even corndogs had guns! Thats pretty scary cause corndogs aren’t that smart…and I’ve always wondered if tricorn hats were made with the same corn as corndogs??? That could tie it all together in my mind.
You betcha corndogs had guns! They were all-American grade-A Federal-lands-grazed-without-a-grazing-contract beef hotdogs covered in five cheese stuffed-crust bacon corn! We’re talking full bacon jacket here, yee haw!
The hat! Where is the HAT!
You blasphemers have got it wrong through 2000 years of a telephone game.
Jesus was the raptor who carried the 10 amendments down from Stone Mountain.
(Purple monkey dishwasher)
Awesomeness is your super-power!
I had a high school science teacher who taught evolution strictly according to the textbook, but would add his own sarcastic asides about how absurd and implausible it was.
It was a terrible compromise–we were under a lot of pressure never to reveal how stupid we knew he was, and creationist students (this was Tennessee where the Scopes trial is still a touchy subject) had the upper hand.
But at least we were taught the facts.
