The Discovery Institute: Bobby Jindal Doesn’t Understand “Creationism” or the Law ^Reply

Ten days ago, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, in responding to a question about teaching creationism in public school classrooms, publicly confirmed what many of us have been saying for years (skip to 9:45): The true purpose of the controversial Louisiana Science Education Act is to provide a mechanism by which public schools may teach creationism and “intelligent design” as valid science. As I mentioned at the time, by explicitly linking the teaching of creationism and intelligent design with the Louisiana Science Education Act, Bobby Jindal unwittingly exposed the law as facially unconstitutional and violative of the Establishment Clause.

Jindal’s remarks, not surprisingly, sent off alarms at the Discovery Institute, a creationist lobbying organization that touts the Louisiana Science Education Act as one of its signature legislative accomplishments. Indeed, the LSEA was based, in large part, off of the Discovery Institute’s “model statute.” The blog Sensuous Curmudgeon has been tracking this from the very beginning, and they cut right to the chase. Quoting (bold mine):

The LSEA is the Discovery Institute’s crown jewel, so this admission by Jindal is one of the biggest public relations crises they’ve ever faced. Everyone has always known the real purpose of the LSEA (that’s why it was supported by all those Louisiana legislators who don’t know the difference between science and Voodoo), but the Discoveroids and their useful idiots have always claimed that the law is all about teaching science and it has nothing to do with creationism. Now, to the horror of the Discoveroids, Jindal has flat-out admitted that the law permits teaching creationism.

In response to Jindal’s comments connecting the teaching of creationism to the LSEA, the Discovery Institute published a baffling and hastily concocted blog post titled “Gotcha! Governor Jindal Avoids Lawyering on TV.” According to the Discovery Institute, when Bobby Jindal was speaking about the intent and purpose of a law that he personally signed, a law that his administration has defended in two separate Senate Education Committee meetings, he wasn’t speaking as the Governor, the man responsible for signing, enacting, and enforcing this law; according to the Discovery Institute, Bobby Jindal was speaking personally, as a politician.

Jindal may be an Ivy League educated Rhodes Scholar who turned down the opportunity to attend Yale Law School and who has spent the last fifteen years of his life at the highest levels of state and federal government, and yes, Jindal may have served two terms as a United States Congressman in the House of Representatives, which automatically qualifies him as one of the most powerful lawmakers in the country. But according to the Discovery Institute, Bobby Jindal’s comments about the intent of the law he signed shouldn’t be taken seriously, because, well, Bobby Jindal isn’t a lawyer. Quoting from the Discovery Institute (bold mine):

Like the critics of the LSEA, Governor Jindal is not a lawyer. He delivers no legal memo. However, unlike the critics of the LSEA, Governor Jindal is a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in biology, an experienced politician who knows what his role is and when to stick to it.

….

Teaching actual creationism in public schools is not constitutionally acceptable, if that’s even what he meant. It seems more likely that Jindal, like a lot of other people, used the term “creationism” imprecisely.

….

In brief, Jindal was speaking as a politician with an agenda, not as an interpreter of presently existing law.

I imagine the Discovery Institute thought they were doing Jindal a favor– covering for him– by suggesting that he had no idea what he was talking about, but instead, they managed to publish one of the most brutal (and patronizing) critiques ever written about Bobby Jindal, a direct refutation of the image that Jindal has spent nearly two decades attempting to cultivate– Jindal as the brilliant policy wonk, the wunderkind who is fluent and exhaustively informed on every single issue, encyclopedic and authoritative.

According to the Discovery Institute, Bobby Jindal doesn’t know what “creationism” means, and he doesn’t know the law. As vehemently as I disagree with Bobby Jindal on this and many other issues, I’m quite certain: He fully understands what creationism and intelligent design are, and he knows exactly what his law does. The only reason the Discovery Institute is in damage control mode is because they are aware Jindal admitted, openly and perhaps unintentionally, that the Louisiana Science Education Act is unconstitutional. Quoting again:

The TV interview (with Jindal) is not legislative history. It can’t be used by courts to construct the legislative intent behind the statute, for good or bad. Nor does it reveal how the law is actually being implemented.

Without question, the remarks of the Governor who signed the law and is responsible for implementing the law can be used by the courts. Sure, Jindal’s remarks may not speak to legislative history or legislative intent; they’re actually far more important: They indicate how he seeks to use the law. (I don’t know who the Discovery Institute thinks they’re fooling).

The Discovery Institute’s effectiveness relies entirely on its capacity for plausible deniability: They can’t explicitly promote a creationism law, because that’s unconstitutional. As they learned in 2005 in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District decision, they also can’t explicitly promote “intelligent design,” because that’s also unconstitutional. So, the Discovery Institute adapted, pardon the pun. Their model statute doesn’t explicitly promote creationism or intelligent design; it even contains a provision about how the law should not be construed to “promote any religious doctrine” or “discriminate” against religious beliefs, a provision that has been grossly misread by Jindal apologists like LSUS Professor Jeff Sadow, who, in a recent comment on NOLA.com, accused critics of never reading the LSEA and then incorrectly claimed that the LSEA actually prohibits the teaching of religion as science. To be clear, the LSEA was designed to facilitate the teaching of religion as science.

Just ask the guy who enacted it.

Louisiana Lawmaker Completely Guts “Lord’s Prayer” Bill ¹

A couple of weeks ago, I broke a story about State Representative Katrina Jackson’s attempt to pass legislation that would have ensured the daily recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools. The story was picked up nationally. The day after I published the story, it was mentioned on “Overtime” with Bill Maher. Yesterday, it was referenced in a story on Salon.com. Jonathan Turley, the nationally-renowned constitutional law professor (and former Tulane law professor), wrote about it on his blog, arguing that it definitively violated the Establishment Clause. It was also picked up by the Friendly Atheist blog on Patheos, and the David Pakman Show.

Well, I am happy to report that Representative Jackson has completely gutted the bill, removing practically all of its most controversial provisions and amending it, instead, to focus on the rights of public school teachers to participate in student-led prayer groups, as long as these events are held before or after school and the teachers are “off the clock.” The amended bill also includes a provision that would allow for student prayer groups to use public school facilities during “noninstructional” (sic) time during the school day, a proposal that I think is riddled with logistical, constitutional, and legal problems (and one I hope she will scrap). Quoting:

Section 1. R.S. 17:2118 is hereby enacted to read as follows: §2118. Prayer; student-initiated; conditions

A. Upon the request of any public school student or students, the proper school authorities may permit students to gather in a classroom, auditorium, or other space that is not in use for prayer at any time before the school day begins when the school is open and students are allowed on campus, at any time after the school day ends provided that at least one student club or organization is meeting at that time, or at any noninstructional time during the school day. A school employee may be assigned to supervise the gathering if such supervision is also requested by the student or students and the school employee volunteers to supervise the gathering.

B. Any school employee may attend and participate in the gathering if it occurs before the employee’s work day begins or after the employee’s work day ends.

C. Any parent may attend the gathering if the parent adheres to school procedures for approval of visitors on the school campus.

D. The students may invite persons from the community to attend and participate in the gathering if other school organizations and clubs are allowed to make similar invitations. Such persons shall adhere to school procedures for approval of visitors on the school campus.

While there may be some debate over whether her new legislation’s provisions about teacher participation violates the Equal Access Act, at the very least, this is a legitimate debate: Currently, the law prohibits teachers from actively participating in student-led prayer groups; teachers may only “monitor” these events and activities as custodians.

Although it is important for student religious groups to actually be led by students and not by public school employees, Representative Jackson’s retooled legislation, if challenged, would likely provoke a real, substantive discussion on the rights of teachers who are not “on the clock” to pray aloud with students in student-led events before school. The law is a little vague on this, but it would be absurdly naive to think that this isn’t already being done, nearly 100% of the time. The question hinges on the distinctions between “monitoring” and “participating” and the ways in which it applies to prayer and other religious rituals.

That said, much of Representative Jackson’s amended bill is actually just a recapitulation of existing law. The Equal Access Act already provides students with the right to form religious groups and meet on school property before and after school, so long as the school also provides the same rights and privileges to other groups.

Ms. Jackson’s proposed legislation now also contains language about allowing students the ability to use school facilities during non-instructional hours. As I mentioned earlier, I think this particular proposal is somewhat troubling, because I’m unclear how it could effectively and logistically conform with the Equal Access Act. Moreover, school employees are “on the clock,” even during non-instructional periods, so it appears, at least superficially, to be troubling. The problem is this, as held by the 9th JDC:

Student/staff time at high school constituted “actual classroom instruction” under Equal Access Act, and thus school district would not be required to allow high school religious student group to meet during student/staff time, since such time did not qualify as noninstructional under statute; student/staff time was scheduled period where attendance was taken and students could not leave campus, but were allowed to participate in certain student club meetings with prior arrangement. Education for Economic Security Act, § 802 et seq., 20 U.S.C.A. § 4071 et seq.

Prince v. Jacoby, 303 F.3d 1074 (9th Cir. 2002)

The Supreme Court case Lee v. Weisman makes it clear:

A reasonable dissenter of high school age could believe that standing or remaining silent signified her own participation in, or approval of, the group exercise, rather than her respect for it. And the State may not place the student dissenter in the dilemma of participating or protesting. Since adolescents are often susceptible to peer pressure, especially in matters of social convention, the State may no more use social pressure to enforce orthodoxy than it may use direct means. The embarrassment and intrusion of the religious exercise cannot be refuted by arguing that the prayers are of a de minimis character, since that is an affront to the rabbi and those for whom the prayers have meaning, and since any intrusion was both real and a violation of the objectors’ rights. Pp. 2657–2659.

Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577, 578, 112 S. Ct. 2649, 2651, 120 L. Ed. 2d 467 (1992)

On a final note, though, I want to express my gratitude to Representative Jackson. She and I may not see eye-to-eye on these issues, but almost immediately after I published my first story, Representative Jackson began engaging me (and others) on Twitter and social media. She listened to our concerns, and she responded. Most politicians, when challenged, tend to double-down; Ms. Jackson, however, was receptive, collaborative, and respectful to her critics. I may not like this new legislation, but I like it a lot more than the previous bill. And I sincerely thank her for hearing us out.

Bobby Jindal: Let’s Teach Them Creationism. ³

Today, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal finally admitted, for the very first time, that the controversial Louisiana Science Education Act, which he signed into law during his first year in office, was designed and intended to allow public schools the ability to teach creationism as legitimate scientific theory.

Jindal made his comments to NBC News correspondent Hoda Kotb, during tail end of an interview at the Education Nation conference in New Orleans. Kotb asked Jindal, “Should creationism be taught in school?”

Jindal attempted to dodge the question, pivoting to the importance of science education and ensuring Louisiana students were nationally and internationally competitive. “If you’re asking about what should be taught in private schools, in Catholic schools, in independent schools,” Jindal said, “I think parents can make the decisions about where they send their kids to school, about what kinds of values their kids are taught.” Of course, that wasn’t what Kotb was asking.

“So you don’t think that.. so, not in public schools? You don’t think creationism should be taught in public schools?”

Since NBC News hasn’t yet provided an official transcript of Jindal’s remarks, I’ve taken the liberty of transcribing them (bold mine):

Jindal: “We have what’s called the Science Education Act, that says if a teacher wants to supplement those materials, if the school board’s OK with that, if the State school board’s OK with that, they can supplement those materials.

“Bottom line, at the end of the day, we want our kids to be exposed to the best facts. Let’s teach them about the Big Bang theory. Let’s teach them about evolution. Let’s teach them….

“I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that some people have these beliefs as well.

“Let’s teach them about intelligent design.

“I think teach them the best science.

“Let them, give them the tools where they can make up their own mind, not only in science but as they learn and teach about other controversial issues, whether it’s global warming or whether it’s…”

Kotb: “Climate change…”

Jindal: “Climate change or these other issues. What are we scared of?

“Let’s teach our kids the best facts and information that’s out there. Let’s teach them what people believe and let them debate and learn that.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of exposing our kids to more information, more knowledge. Give them critical thinking skills, and as adults they’ll be able to make their own and best decisions.”

The problem with politicians like Bobby Jindal: Too often, their mouths work faster than their brains. In the span of only thirty seconds of frenetic blathering, Bobby Jindal unwittingly exposed the LSEA as an unconstitutional law respecting the establishment of religion. He took the bait- hook, line, and sinker.

You see, the Louisiana Science Education Act relies on an elaborate legal trick. In its first incarnation as the Louisiana Education Freedom Act, the language was explicitly pro-creationist. In fact, its sponsor, State Senator Ben Nevers, said that the bill was about ensuring that “scientific data related to creationism be taught;” Senator Nevers even admitted that he filed the bill at the request of the right-wing religious organization, the Louisiana Family Forum. But there was one major problem: The courts, including the United State Supreme Court, have repeatedly and consistently declared unconstitutional laws that mandate or encourage the teaching of creationism in public school science classrooms.

State Senator Nevers and the Louisiana Family Forum, likely at the urging of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based creationist organization, had to drop any and all references to creationism if they wanted to stand any chance against a constitutional challenge. So, Senator Nevers refiled and renumbered the bill, and borrowing from the Discovery Institute’s model statute, he even included a cute provision about how the law could not establish religion, something, of course, that is already illegal.

The truth is, of course, that the Louisiana Science Education Act is nothing more than a charade; its purpose and intentions are self-evident: The law has nothing to do with “critical thinking;” it’s about ensuring New Earth Creationists have the authority and the ability to indoctrinate public school children; it’s about equivocating a narrowly-held religious belief with empirically-based scientific theory.

That’s why Jindal screwed up: He admitted it. Sure, it was an open secret, but there is a damn good reason that the law was rewritten and scrubbed of any mention of “creationism.” The Discovery Institute, as sneaky and pernicious as I may find them to be, is at least savvy enough to realize that creationism in the classroom is unconstitutional.

In fact, one of their lawyers, Casey Luskin, wrote a lengthy article for the Liberty University Law Review titled “Zeal for Darwin’s House Consumes Them: How Supporters of Evolution Encourage Violations of the Establishment Clause.” Luskin argues, bafflingly, that even if creation “science” and “intelligent design” aren’t actually grounded in empirical, evidenced-based scientific theory, those who critique the scientific validity of creationism and intelligent design in public schools are in violation of the Establishment Clause’s prohibition against “inhibiting religion.”

Quoting:

Courts have consistently held that advocating creationism in public schools is unconstitutional. In this regard, this present author agrees with courts that there are certain core tenets of creationism—namely its adherence to supernatural or divine forces—which make it an unscientific and untestable religious viewpoint that cannot be constitutionally advocated in public schools. That having been said, there is a glaring asymmetry in the law when courts hold on the one hand that creationism cannot be advocated in public schools because it is not science, but on the other hand that it can be disparaged as “scientifically . . . nonsense,” also because it is not science.

Luskin, like most of those employed by the Discovery Institute, claims that he is not a New Earth Creationist, but he argues that creationists should be allowed to have their cake and eat it too. Science teachers should present Christian creation mythology as “alternative” scientific theory, but if they dare to use the scientific method to “critique” creationism, they’re “inhibiting religion” and violating the First Amendment.

Again, the Louisiana Science Education Act has nothing to do with “critical thinking;” it’s actually about protecting the sanctity of a fundamentally unscientific and definitively religious belief.

With all due respect to those who believe in New Earth Creationism as an article of faith, if creationism is introduced in the science classroom and legitimately and thoroughly “critiqued,” it’s immediately invalidated and discarded. Obviously, that’s not what supporters of the LSEA intend. They’d rather their religion be introduced, uncritically, in order to poke holes in science, to reinforce, validate, and reassure the fundamentalist religious beliefs instilled in young, impressionable children by their fundamentalist religious parents, to stifle a meaningful discussion on things that challenge the validity of evangelical Protestantism.

Bobby Jindal wasn’t supposed to say “creationism.” He was only supposed to say “intelligent design.” The constitutionality of the LSEA is constructed, after all, on semantic dishonesty– neologisms and code language. By even casually suggesting that the State of Louisiana should be teaching “creationism,” as provided under the LSEA, Jindal tears down his own rhetorical house of cards.

In a way, I get it. Jindal’s terrified of these white evangelical Protestants, a group blamed for his loss in the 2003 gubernatorial election. He’s spent much of his five years as Governor kowtowing to them, choppering in every other Sunday to one of their church services in the middle of Nowhere, Louisiana. It may be hard to believe, but Bobby Jindal is still only 41 years old. He’s a young Governor whose political career has been determined by old, white, predominantly rural, evangelical Protestant men. After losing the election in 2003, The American Spectator reported:

“If there was a racist backlash against Jindal anywhere, it would be in north Louisiana, in Duke country,” Louisiana political analyst John Maginnis told Rod Dreher of National Review Online after the race.

To some extent, Blanco laid the groundwork for a such a backlash herself. She dusted off her maiden name and campaigned as Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. Voters encountered the full name on the ballot, where her opponent was listed as “Bobby” Jindal, complete with quotation marks (Jindal’s given name is Piyush). Appealing to tribal instincts in the only state where Frenchness is still considered a virtue, Blanco’s packaging of herself was designed to make it clear who had the deeper roots in Cajun country.

Such tapping of identity politics for ethnic whites is nothing particularly unusual or scandalous. The shamrock incorporated into Irish-American candidates’ names is a staple of local politics across much of the Midwest and Northeast. It would be unfair to suggest that Blanco ran a racist campaign. At the same time, isn’t it worth noting that the usual suspects, to whom unfairness rarely gives pause, haven’t so much as raised an eyebrow?

But it’s time for him to become an adult in this conversation. He’s an Ivy League educated Rhodes Scholar with a degree in Biology. His pandering on creationism is cowardly and intellectually, morally, and ethically dishonest. And I get the impression that he knows it: In his interview with NBC, it was revealing that he attempted to turn the question about creationism in the classroom to the rights of private schools. The LSEA embarrasses Bobby Jindal; it tarnishes his image; it forces him completely off-message. He’s the guy who dared to tell his fellow Republicans to stop being the stupid party, and his own party in Louisiana, the one he, ostensibly, leads, keeps sticking him with stupid. For some reason, perhaps it’s because he’s still young and ambitious and intimidated, Bobby Jindal feels more at ease with lecturing the national Republican Party about their stupidity than confronting people like Gene Mills of the Louisiana Family Forum, who have held hostage the State of Louisiana with their conspiratorial, hateful, and religiously intolerant social agenda.

One final note: In ancient China, during the Zhou Dynasty, the writer Xu Zheng essentially “invented” the creation myth of Pangu. Quoting from Wikipedia:

In the beginning there was nothing in the universe except a formless chaos. However this chaos coalesced into a cosmic egg for about 18,000 years. Within it, the perfectly opposed principles of Yin and Yang became balanced and Pangu emerged (or woke up) from the egg. Pangu is usually depicted as a primitive, hairy giant with horns on his head and clad in furs. Pangu set about the task of creating the world: he separated Yin from Yang with a swing of his giant axe, creating the Earth (murky Yin) and the Sky (clear Yang). To keep them separated, Pangu stood between them and pushed up the Sky. This task took 18,000 years; with each day the sky grew ten feet (3 meters) higher, the Earth ten feet wider, and Pangu ten feet taller. In some versions of the story, Pangu is aided in this task by the four most prominent beasts, namely the Turtle, the Qilin, the Phoenix, and the Dragon.

After the 18,000 years had elapsed, Pangu was laid to rest. His breath became the wind, mist and clouds; his voice the thunder; left eye the sun and right eye the moon; his head became the mountains and extremes of the world; his blood formed rivers; his muscles the fertile lands; his facial hair, the stars and milky way; his fur the bushes and forests; his bones the valuable minerals; his bone marrows sacred diamonds; his sweat fell as rain; and the fleas on his fur carried by the wind became the fish and animals throughout the land. Nüwa the Goddess then used the mud of the water bed to form the shape of humans. These humans were very smart since they were individually crafted. Nüwa then became bored of individually making every human so she started putting a rope in the water bed and letting the drops of mud that fell from it become new humans. These small drops became new humans, not as smart as the first.

Of course, this is all absurd and silly, and even at the time, the Chinese knew it was just a myth: A cosmic egg that gestated for 18,000 years and then became the entire universe?

Guess what?

It’s just as scientifically valid as New Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design.

Zack Kopplin on “Real Time With Bill Maher”: A Live-Blogging Extravaganza ³

Upperestdate: As a result of his appearance, Kopplin has been featured by Huffington Post, Upworthy, TruthDig, the Moderate Voice, and Media Matters, among others.

Upperdate: Once the video is online, I’ll post it. But this is my favorite tweet of the night:

Update: So, I’ll live-tweet this and then update the blog afterward. If you don’t have HBO, you can still watch the Overtime segment online.

Tonight, Zack Kopplin, the Louisiana native and Rice University sophomore who, at the age of 17, launched an international campaign against Louisiana’s unconstitutional creationism in the classroom law, will appear as the special guest on the HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

As a high school student, his hometown newspaper, The Baton Rouge Advocate, called Zack a “giant killer.” He is also the recipient of the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award (not to be confused with other prizes Hefner doles out at the Playboy Mansion), and the National Center for Science Education’s Friend of Darwin Award (not to be confused with the Darwin Award). Last year, Zack again generated national and international attention on the exhaustive research he conducted on creationist voucher schools (Full Disclosure: I collaborated on some of this research with Zack and am a registered agent on his new non-profit organization). Late last year, Zack was selected as the first-ever “TroubleMaker of the Year.”

Zack will become the youngest-ever special guest on Bill Maher’s show.

The show airs at 9PM Central Time, and we’ll be liveblogging here on CenLamar. Contributions are welcome.

Stay tuned.

Jindal’s Unconstitutional “Tim Tebow” Law Proves Louisiana Legislature Cares More About Football Than Education ⁵

In many parts of Texas, high school football isn’t simply a tradition; it’s a religion, a way of life, and a mega-million dollar industry. It’s been the subject of bestselling novels, movies, and at least one hit network television show, Friday Night Lights, based on the novel of the same name. Last year, a high school in Allen, Texas made international headlines after opening a $60 football stadium, a decision that perfectly epitomizes the enormous imbalances in public education funding and financing. When the stadium in Allen was under construction, Texas Governor Rick Perry, along with the state legislature, cut more than $5 billion from public education.

Although Louisiana may not be known for high school football extravagance, football is still a religion for many of us; our NFL team, after all, is the Saints. In fact, for the fourth year in a row, more professional football players (per capita) hail from Louisiana than from any other state. Louisiana high school football may not be as glamorous or as well-funded as our Texan neighbors, but we know how to cultivate talent. And although Louisiana high school football games aren’t played in mega-million dollar stadiums, they still generate significant revenue.

Last year, when Governor Bobby Jindal swept through his education “reform” initiative, which included the most expansive school voucher program in the country, I imagined, perhaps cynically, that financially struggling private schools would be likely to exploit the program and offer a disproportionate number of vouchers to star athletes attending academically struggling public schools.

Take, for example, Evangel Christian Academy in Shreveport, a football powerhouse. During the last twenty years, Evangel has won a dozen high school football championships, a fact made even more impressive when you consider its high school opened in 1990. But in those twenty-three years, Evangel, despite its prowess on the football field, has only graduated two National Merit Scholars. (There were two in my graduating class at a public high school in Alexandria, at least four the year before. In fact, my Louisiana public high school even had a National Merit Scholar in its very first year).

Now, to be fair, I have no way of knowing whether or not Evangel Christian Academy is using the voucher program as a way of recruiting athletes to play for its football team. And unfortunately, neither does Superintendent John White or anyone else in charge, because the State of Louisiana doesn’t actually oversee which students are approved or denied for vouchers; the school does. Currently, there is no way to demonstrate that a private school is exploiting the voucher program to disproportionately recruit star athletes (even when they claim a “lottery” selection process; a lottery, after all, can always be rigged). But we do know this (bold mine):

A mother named Trailais Tillman signed up her son, Aidan, to receive a voucher. Aiden was zoned to go to a public school that is failing. She was thrilled when the lottery resulted in her son receiving a school voucher for a private school called Evangel Christian Academy.

There was a big problem, though. Aiden has autism. Evangel Christian Academy told Trailais Tillman that the school does not have the services that he needs. This means that even through Aiden was selected to receive a school voucher he cannot accept it.

Again, I hate to sound cynical, but Aiden is better off at a public school that is legally obligated to provide him with individualized special education. Either way, his story perfectly demonstrates the problem with Jindal’s voucher program– trapping the most vulnerable students into struggling schools and then reallocating already-scant resources to unaccountable private schools.

Bobby Jindal’s program uses taxpayer dollars to actively discriminate against mentally and physically disabled children. Period.

And guess what? Bobby Jindal doesn’t deny it. The Louisiana Department of Education actually issued a response to the story about Aiden. They claimed their hands were tied because non-public schools weren’t required to adhere to federal laws that protect disabled students. If Governor Jindal wants to provide tens of millions of dollars every year to private schools, then he should be championing an analog of the IDEA Act for Louisiana, instead of cowardly ducking behind it.

His voucher program has very little to do about “saving education.” So-called “school choice” provides conservatives with the ability to do two things they’ve always wanted to do: Monetize public education and eliminate all of the annoying attendant liabilities and obligations– like adequately providing for the disabled or not discriminating against students on the basis of their religion.

This has nothing to do with helping those who are most affected by failing public schools. If the goal is to decimate and further marginalize a struggling inner-city neighborhood or rural community, then one of the best ways is to strip away the funding it needs to maintain and operate its most important civic institutions– its public neighborhood schools, to gut those institutions of all but the most vulnerable, effectively transforming our public schools into federally-mandated special education centers for the mentally and physically disabled and for children who struggle academically.

So, back to football, because, apparently, that is what our legislature really cares about:

During the next month, the legislature will consider three different bills that aim to force the Louisiana High School Athletic Association to reconsider its decision to create two different high school football championships, one for public schools and one that, essentially, is for private schools. Additionally, the State Senate will consider a bill that repeals a series of laws about the LHSAA that the Louisiana State Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional.

The irony is: Unlike Governor Bobby Jindal or the majority of the Louisiana legislature, the Louisiana High School Athletic Association actually has standards. The LHSAA doesn’t like it when member schools attempt to cheat the system by stealing athletes from other schools. They understand that high school athletics, particularly high school football, can be a cash cow, and as a result, there may be an incentive for some schools to “game” the system.

A couple of months ago, the Jindal Administration’s and the Louisiana legislature’s attempts at coercing the LHSAA were dealt a death blow at the Louisiana State Supreme Court. You can read the case here. It’s a doozy.

But the facts are pretty simple: the Louisiana legislature, at Jindal’s behest, passed a bill that required the LHSAA to allow home school students the ability to participate in their sanctioned events. Basically, home school students would become “free agents” in the lucrative world of high school football. The law violated the LSHAA’s own bylaws, which provide a framework for qualifying schools and students.

Jindal, under the banner of “school choice,” attempted to force the LHSAA, by law, to change its practices, even though neither he nor the legislature attempted to interfere with the bylaws of other, privately-held Christian athletic associations. Moreover, the Jindal administration asked the courts to rule that the LHSAA was a “quasi-public” organization, a distinction that likely made no real difference. The LHSAA was organized as a private non-profit corporation. Labeling it “quasi-public” merely meant the legislative auditor could review its annual financial reports, something already done by the IRS or anyone with a subscription to GuideStar.com.

In their amicus brief to the Louisiana Supreme Court, the Jindal administration spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Tim Tebow. Quoting (bold mine):

Perhaps the most well-known beneficiary of Florida’s Craig Dickinson Act is Tim Tebow. The statute allowed Tebow, who was home-schooled, to play football at Allen D. Nease High School in Ponte Verde, Florida. Tebow’s exploits as a high school football player are the stuff of legend in Florida. It is also common knowledge that Tebow, as the quarterback of the University of Florida football team, won the Heisman Trophy in 2007 — the award given to the most outstanding college football player in the country. Tebow helped lead the University of Florida football team to two college football national championships — one in 2006 and another in 2008. At the end of his college football career, Tebow held the all-time Southeastern Conference records for passing efficiency and rushing touchdowns. As a result of his accomplishments on the football field, Tebow became perhaps the most recognizable ambassador for the University of Florida and currently is a prominent professional quarterback in the National Football League.

It is a bit sobering to realize that if a student athlete like Tebow were residing in Louisiana today, the LHSAA would be opposing legislation that would allow him, as a home-schooled student, to play high school football and perhaps pursue an athletic scholarship to a university like LSU. In other words, if the LHSAA were to prevail here and have Louisiana’s legislation declared unconstitutional, the LHSAA would thwart the development of home-schooled student athletes like Tebow in Louisiana.

No, this is not a joke, though the majority of the Louisiana State Supreme Court may have a different perspective: They were not impressed or convinced by Jindal’s pathetic “Tim Tebow” argument, and not only did they hold the LHSAA is, in fact, a private non-profit organization that is legally allowed to establish its own bylaws, they also struck down the entirety of Jindal’s “Tim Tebow” laws as unconstitutional.

If you want to understand why, exactly, the Louisiana legislature is considering a series of bills that would effectively ban public high schools from participating in LHSAA-sanctioned events, here’s your answer: The Jindal Administration, in its push for “school choice,” has been attempting to chip away at the authority of the LHSAA, an organization primarily comprised of actual educators, because the LHSAA believes its member schools and its participating students should all have to follow the same rules. (In the LHSAA’s brief, they list a series of legislative actions that were specifically undertaken to benefit individual football players).

And that’s what makes the LHSAA’s decision to create a dual high school football championship so genius and so unnerving to Jindal and his supporters. Many of these voucher schools were hoping to make money by recruiting top-notch public school athletes, but if they can’t compete against the teams with the most talent, their “championship” becomes less meaningful and more difficult to commoditize.

There’s less of an incentive to use public dollars for vouchers to build up an athletic program. And that’s exactly why this pending legislation is so important. At the end of this year’s session, Louisiana citizens will have a much better understanding of who cares more about high school football than ensuring a quality education.

State Senator Mike Walsworth: “I’m Not a Scientist” and I “Don’t Know Anything About Science” ¹

In the upcoming weeks, the Louisiana State Senate Education Committee will, once again, consider a bill to repeal the misnamed Louisiana Science Education Act. Last year, during the committee hearing, State Senator Mike Walsworth, a Republican from Ouachita Parish, asked a series of questions that- months later- made him the star of a viral video on YouTube.

And not to brag, but I was actually the first blogger to post this e.coli video, only a few hours after Zack Kopplin had uploaded it onto YouTube. Unfortunately for me, I buried the lede. There were so many absurd things said during last year’s committee meeting, so many different things going on, all at once, I didn’t know where to begin.

So I included the videos in an overwrought personal essay, instead of where they belonged– headlining a post detailing and documenting the willful ignorance of lawmakers who are responsible for making informed decisions on education policy. Thankfully, though, in an interview with Zack on the popular website i09, the Walsworth video clip was given prominent attention and within 24 hours, it and a few others went viral, racking up nearly 700,000 views. Suffice it to say, the video of Walsworth’s questioning a high school biology teacher on the merits of evolution is, perhaps, the most viral video in the history of the legislature.

Shreveport rap star Hurricane Chris will likely be disappointed to learn that his stirring rendition of the song “Halle Barry” isn’t even close. Walsworth’s video has already received twice as many hits as Hurricane Chris’s historic song. For some comic and musical relief:

And as fun and irreverent and (frankly) bizarre as Hurricane Chris’s performance was, I seriously doubt he would have anticipated that his viral video would soon be surpassed by a series of tired questions about science education. Hurricane Chris wasn’t the rock star. State Senator Mike Walsworth was, and by the of end the day, he likely could never appreciate why, months after this testimony had wrapped up, it was suddenly being ridiculed by people all over the world.

But here is the most interesting thing, and it had not been reported in Louisiana. A few months ago, in response to these viral videos and during an interview with Fox News 26 in Houston, Senator Walsworth said, “From the blogs. ‘Hey, you probably don’t know anything about science.’ And they’re probably right.,” he said. “But I was just asking questions. And that’s what debate is supposed to be about. I mean, I’m not a scientist.”

To recap: Mike Walsworth supports the thinly-disguised religious education bill, the Louisiana Science Education Act and then admits to Fox News Houston that those who oppose him are “probably right” and then, finally, concedes that he is not actually a scientist. He continues:

Do I believe that God created the heavens and the earth? Absolutely, I do,” Walsworth told FOX 26 News.

That is, without question, Walsworth’s personal religious beliefs on the origin and the development of the Universe; it’s not science, and it is not even a substitute for science.

They continue: “But the Louisiana legislator points out a paragraph in the law expressly forbidding the promotion of any religious doctrine or “discrimination for or against religion or non-religion.”Senator Walsworth says the purpose of the law was to give teachers and school administrators more flexibility in how they present concepts like evolution, global warming and human cloning. And the lawmaker says the controversy over the Louisiana Science Education Act is overblown.”

I vehemently disagree. This law was conceived with one central goal in mind: To promote Christian creationism as a competing scientific theory. But it’s not a scientific theory; it’s a religious myth. And eventually, it will be held Unconstitutional, despite its efforts to cleverly, serpentine work around the law.

Regardless of how milquetoast the language may seem, the undeniable truth is that by ensuring “flexibility” for teachers to critique valid science, they can, by definition, teach religion as science.

The Act may sparkle and smell like a new car, but if you ride it around the block a few times, parts will begin to fail and fall out; the headlights will break, and within weeks, you’ll realize you bought a lemon. Great on paper. But on the road, a death trap.

It’s worth noting: I don’t know who Mike Walsworth is. Maybe he is a nice man. I know many politicians who regret a vote or two. But he faces a daunting task this cycle: He admits that the scientists were right and that he knows nothing about science education.

Finally, he writes, “The Department of Education, as of – I just talked to them last week. Not one parental complaint. Not one.”

We have more than 70,000 signatures officially complaining, including thousands of Louisiana parents. The repeal effort has been endorsed by 78 Nobel Laureate scientists, dozens and dozens of ministers, priests, and clergy, the largest Science Education groups in the world, Hollywood celebrity comedians like Jason Alexander, Patton Oswalt, Bill Maher, and countless others.

When Gene Mills and Mike Walsworth and company attempt to suggest that no one has complained to anyone, I suggest they come prepared with their checkbooks. Coping the thousands of responses and then tens of thousands of pages will be labor intensive.

Bobby Jindal Proposes Largest Tax Increase in Louisiana History, Highest Combined Sales Tax Rate in the US ¹

Less than a year ago, Governor Bobby Jindal vetoed a bill to permanently extend a existing 4-cent tax on a pack of cigarettes. At the time, Jindal explained (emphasis mine), “I have made a commitment to the taxpayers of Louisiana to oppose all attempts to raise taxes.” It was a blatantly disingenuous argument: The bill wasn’t about “raising” taxes any more than they already were; it was a mere formality: Renewing a tax on cigarettes that had already been on the books, and Jindal’s opposition had nothing to do with the merits of the policy itself and everything to do with ensuring his unblemished resume tax on increases. And the timing couldn’t been worse. Jindal, after all, was still angling for a spot on Romney’s Presidential ticket.

At the time, James Gill of The Times-Picayune noted (bold mine):

But smoking is not the issue here. Jindal must figure that taking a few licks now will be worth it if there is a reward down the road, perhaps when he is running for another office. Indeed, when urging his fellow Republicans to uphold his veto of the cigarette tax, he said the issue is “personal” because he made a promise not to raise taxes.

The idea that it is against Jindal’s principles to break a promise no doubt raised a smile on some of the faces present. But this promise is different, because Jindal is mad about ideological purity.

Jindal was so dead-set on not raising ANY taxes, even a perfunctory renewal tax on cigarettes, that he wouldn’t even consider renewing a paltry 4 cent tax on cigarettes, a tax that had already been on the books. He was, after all, a man of principle.

A year later, Bobby Jindal apparently believes that he had hypnotized the entire State of Louisiana into some type of quasi-amnesiac ignorance (And if his college essay about participating in an unsanctioned demonic exorcism maintained even an ounce of credibility, it may seem at least remotely possible, particularly among his most devout believers).

But if you carried any illusion about Governor Jindal’s consistent ideological position, you’re now having to confront an inconvenient truth:

Two days ago, Jindal announced plans to impose the single-largest combined sales tax rate in the country: Under Jindal’s plan, for every ten dollars you spend in anything and everything, you’ll need to spend an additional dollar with the government, Again, a year go, Jindal even refused to renew a tax on cigarettes; now he wants to collect $1.41 more for every pack sold.

Any why? Because Jindal wants some way– any way– to shuffle in big, out-of-state corporations and pillagers- no state income taxes, no corporation taxes, no taxes on risky speculation. Come first; we’ll sort out the details later. The break almost exclusively benefits the wealthy.

But don’t just take my word. From The New York Times: (I don’t do this often, but read the whole thing:)

These regional disparities go back to Reconstruction, when Southern Republicans increased property taxes on defeated white landowners and former slaveholders to pay for the first public services — education, hospitals, roads — ever provided to black citizens. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, conservative Democrats — popularly labeled “the Redeemers” — rolled taxes back to their prewar levels and inserted supermajority clauses into state constitutions to ensure it could never happen again. Property taxes were frozen; income taxes were held down; corporate taxes were almost nonexistent.

Practically the only tax that could rise was the one that hurt the poor the most: the sales tax. And rise it did, throughout the Deep South in the late 19th century, then spreading into the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and the rest of the region in the 1960s and 1970s. Even liberal politicians weren’t able to buck the tide — just ask Bill Clinton, who as governor of Arkansas urgently sought new revenue to improve his state’s ailing schools and found the sales tax was the only politically viable option.

If this were just a history lesson, we could set it aside. It isn’t. In the last 30 years, these trends have only gotten worse. Southern states have steadily increased the tax burden on their poorest citizens by shifting the support of the public sector to sales taxes and fees for public services. After California voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property-tax increases, in 1978, Western states began to move in a similar direction. Sales taxes on clothing and school supplies and fees for bus fare and car registration take up, of course, a far bigger slice of a poor household’s budget than they do from the rich.

Over the same 30-year period, some Northeastern and Midwestern states moved in the opposite direction. They mimicked the federal government by passing their own earned-income tax credits (and making them refundable, as the federal government has done, so that very low-income earners get a check after filing their returns), preserved progressive state income-tax rates, and either exempted food and other basics from sales taxes or gave sales-tax rebates to low-income households. No Southern state provides refunds to its poor citizens through the tax code, no matter how little they earn.

There are many reasons to worry about the growing regional divide. But even leaving aside basic fairness — why should a poor child in the Northeast have greater life chances than one in the South? — the divergence exacerbates poverty itself, driving households deeper into distress and lowering social mobility.

For a book published in 2011, my colleague Rourke L. O’Brien and I analyzed the combined burden of sales tax, state and local income taxes on poor households in 49 states, based on consumer expenditures, from 1982 to 2008. (We omitted Alaska because it offers oil-revenue-related rebates to every household). We looked at the relationship between the total tax burden on a poor family of three and state-level figures for mortality, morbidity, teenage childbearing, dropping out of high school, property crime and violent crime.

The fact is, the more the poor are taxed, the worse off they are, whether they are working or not.

And they continue:

It turns out that after factoring out all other explanations — like racial composition, poverty rates, the amount spent on education or health care, the size of the state’s economy, existing inequality levels, and differences in the cost of living — the relationship between taxing the poor and negative outcomes like premature death persisted. For every $100 increase on taxes at the poverty line, we saw an additional 7 deaths and 78 property crimes per 100,000 people, and a quarter of a percentage point decrease in high school completion.

Southern states have far higher rates of strokes, heart disease and infant mortality than the rest of the country. Students drop out of high school in larger numbers. These outcomes are not just a consequence of a love of fried food or higher poverty levels. Holding all those conditions constant, the poor of the South — and increasingly the West — do worse because their states tax them more heavily. They have less money to buy medication, so their health problems get worse. High sales taxes make meals more expensive, so they shift to cheaper, unhealthy food. If people can’t make ends meet, they may turn to the underground economy or to crime.

This self-defeating pattern has plagued the citizens of the “meaner states,” the ones that tax poor people at a higher rate, for a long time. But it is about to get worse. Governors in fiscally strapped states are hoping to roll back state earned-income tax credits. Some — like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Dave Heineman of Nebraska and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma — are aiming to cut or even eliminate state income and corporate taxes and raise sales taxes. North Carolina lawmakers are considering the same thing.

Proponents say these moves will make their states more economically competitive, bring back jobs, and attract high-income residents. But economists who have studied the impact of raising taxes on residential choices have found that tax rates don’t make much of a difference. Employers represent a different story: they are attracted to low-tax states, particularly if they don’t need high-skilled labor. Accordingly, low-wage job opportunities have grown in the Cotton Belt and the Sun Belt, and shrunk in the Rust Belt. There is something to be said for this, if the goal is to replace the nonworking poor with the working poor. But this is hardly a strategy for eradicating poverty itself.

The fact is, the more the poor are taxed, the worse off they are, whether they are working or not. We all pay a huge price for this shortsightedness. Medicaid payments, food stamps, disability benefits — all of these federal programs swoop in to try to patch up a frayed safety net. Consequently, the Southern states reap more dollars in federal benefits than they pay in taxes (like Mississippi, which saw a net gain of $240 billion between 1990 and 2009), while the wealthier states — which do more to take care of their own — lose out for every dollar they pay (like New Jersey, which handed over a net of $706 billion over that same period). As noble as the federal effort to rescue the poor in the “mean states” may be, it is not enough to reverse the impact of regressive taxation.

There is a better way: increasing taxes on luxury goods; exempting necessities like food, medicine and children’s clothing from sales taxes; and perhaps most important, issuing tax rebates and preserving refundable earned-income tax credits, which put more money in the hands of low-income households. Since poor families tend to spend all of what they take in, these protections would stimulate the economy and preserve, or even expand, the job base.

The states headed in the opposite direction are not only damaging the most vulnerable of their citizens, but exacting a significant toll on Americans in states with more progressive tax policies. We all pay for the damage done when states try to solve their fiscal problems, or score ideological points, on the backs of the poor.

Sound familiar? It should.

On a final note, I highly recommend Tyler Bridge’s commentary on The Lens. Louisiana is so lucky to have him back.

The Discovery Institute, the Creationist, Pseudoscience Lobbying Group, Touts Its “Insider” Role in Drafting “Academic Freedom” Legislation ^Reply

In America, the most controversial laws typically have the least controversial names. It’s one of our grandest and most cynical traditions. How could you possibly vote against the PATRIOT Act? That, by definition, would be unpatriotic, right? Last week, the Arkansas legislature overrode a veto by the Governor and passed the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country, the “Human Heartbeat Protection Act,” a great name for a blatantly unconstitutional law.

While the practice of naming legislation the same way corporations use focus groups to sell cereal or cars or anti-depression medication may seem cynical and exploitative, it is nonetheless very effective. Even if you don’t know a single thing about policy, you can still make a fortune if you know how to market policy.

There may be no better example of this phenomenon than those behind the promotion of so-called “academic freedom” laws. “Academic freedom” sounds like a feel-good, aspirational ideal; the term may not be in the Constitution, but it sounds like it should be. And if you’re a progressive or an academic or both, the chances are that you consider the broad concept of “academic freedom” to be sacrosanct, something critically important to a functioning democracy, a thriving economy, and a real and robust education system. But “academic freedom” is not really the intention of those who promote, lobby for, and draft “academic freedom” legislation. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

If your state legislature or your Governor is supporting an “academic freedom” bill, beware: Today, “academic freedom” is code language for “religious indoctrination.” Despite what it sounds like, “academic freedom” legislation is almost entirely concerned with giving public schools “legal” (albeit likely unconstitutional) permission to promote the religious beliefs of evangelical Protestants, particularly New Earth Creationists, in the science classroom. It’s really that simple.

And it’s complete nonsense.

In 2008, Governor Bobby Jindal signed the Louisiana Science Education Act, a law that has absolutely nothing to do with science education and everything to do with making sure that New Earth Creationists would be given a platform in public science classes. It wasn’t the first creationist law in the country; we’ve had others, but all of those had been struck down as unconstitutional.

No doubt whatsoever, the Louisiana Science Education Act is unconstitutional. However cleverly worded and evasive it may be, the LSEA was intended to allow for the state-sponsored endorsement of creationism, and as such, even if it never is actually used as intended, it still violates the Establishment Clause.

The fools behind this legislation aren’t scientists; they’re religious zealots and pandering, comically ignorant politicians. State Senator Ben Nevers, the man who introduced the legislation (but quite obviously didn’t write a single word of it), revealed that he was actually working at the behest of the Louisiana Family Forum. “They (the Louisiana Family Forum) believe that scientific data related to creationism should be discussed when dealing with Darwin’s theory,” he said. ”This (the LSEA) would allow the discussion of scientific facts.”

I hate to break it to Senator Nevers, but the Louisiana Family Forum was punking him: There are no — count it, zero– “scientific facts” and not even a scintilla of scientific data that support creationism. Creationism is a religious belief. It is not and will never be science.

When Senator Karen Carter Peterson filed a bill to repeal the LSEA, State Senator Julie Quinn ridiculed the 78 Nobel laureates and the thousands of scientists all across the world who had endorsed the repeal effort as nothing more than people “with little letters behind their names.” And a year later, when Senator Peterson filed another repeal bill, during a hearing of the Senate Education Committee, State Senator Mike Walsworth asked one of the dumbest questions in the history of the Louisiana State Senate and, in the process, demonstrated to the entire world that he has absolutely no business on any committee that deals with education policy.

As loyal readers know, I have been covering the story of the Louisiana Science Education Act for more than two years. In February of 2011, I wrote about a kid named Zack Kopplin from Baton Rouge Magnet who had recently been commended by The Huffington Post as a “profile in evolutionary courage.” And I’ll give credit where credit is due: If Zack hadn’t sounded the alarms, if he hadn’t been as earnest and bold and articulate about the real problems with this so-called “academic freedom bill,” it may have been ignored as yet another symbolic victory for the entrenched political elites. I recruited Zack to at least spend a weekend at the New Leaders Council Institute in Baton Rouge.

Fast forward a couple of years: Zack is now nationally famous, and it, at times, is surreal to me, not only because I now consider Zack as one of my best friends and most talented collaborators, but also because his fame has become undeniably relevant. This act in Louisiana, the LSEA, is critically important, but the related research that Zack and others (including myself and bloggers like Jason Berry and journalists in small hometown newspapers like The News Star) on voucher schools in Louisiana and across the country is actually much more important and informative and terrifying.

This is fun “work,” if you can call it that with a straight face. None of us are getting paid to conduct this research. Zack hasn’t earned a dime from an official sponsor or someone who simply wants to advertise. And neither have I.

A couple of weeks ago, Bill Moyers asked Zack who, exactly, was behind the Louisiana Science Education Act. (I know I am STILL burying the lede, but stick with me). And without hesitation, Zack answered:

Nationally, there’s this group called the Discovery Institute. They’re a creationist think tank that’s been pushing these types of laws all around the country for years and years. They even tried to get one nationally included in George Bush’s No Child Left Behind with the Santorum amendment. And so they wrote this law and they passed it on locally to the Louisiana Family Forum, which is our affiliate of Focus on the Family. Senator Ben Nevers, who sponsored it, said the Louisiana Family Forum suggested the law to him because they wanted creationism discussed when talking about Darwin’s theory. So we know from the horse’s mouth exactly what this law is about.

Recently, Louisiana Family Forum President Gene Mills told The Houston Press:

“Zack does very well…The problem is, he’s lost every single time in the court of public opinion…There are only so many times you can tell everybody they’re dumb and still prevail in a popular vote.”

It’s a bafflingly ridiculous claim. The LSEA has never been subjected a public vote. The Great Reverend President Gene Mills, a man who apparently seems to be cheating on his organization’s taxes (by funding his 501c4 organization almost exclusively through 501c3 transfers), probably shouldn’t lecture anyone on calling people “dumb.”

The Discovery Institute’s response was even worse. Not only do they refuse to discount their role in this type of “academic freedom” legislation; they are proud of it.

The Discovery Institute wants “equal time” with Bill Moyers. I have an offer: I’ll give any and every one of you an unedited interview debate about these issues. Name a time and a date, because this is nonsense:

But why not have your producer now give Discovery Institute a call? Zack is a torchbearer for his cause. But he is also an outsider to the academic freedom lawmaking process, and so understandably missed the ball a few times, leaving your viewers in the dark.

Discovery Institute, on the other hand, is on the inside, and ready to shed light from a privileged vantage point. We draft and amend academic freedom language, counsel lawmakers privately,testify publicly, and are otherwise intimately acquainted with the intentions behind and likely effects of academic freedom legislation.

We’re ready, Discovery Institute.

Zack Kopplin’s Full Interview With Bill Moyers ^Reply

Transcript:

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to this week’s broadcast and the “troublemaker” of the year. That’s right, my guest is the first recipient of a new award that singles out teenagers who are not afraid to speak their minds on major issues, even when everyone else around them disagrees. Not afraid, in other words, to stir up trouble for a good cause. That’s what Zack Kopplin was doing just the other day at a Save Texas Schools rally in Austin, the state capital:

ZACK KOPPLIN: Do we want Texas tax dollars being used to fund private schools teaching creationism? Say no Texas!

ATTENDEES: No!

BILL MOYERS: Zack Kopplin was chosen to receive the first “troublemaker” of the year award because he’s made waves fighting on behalf of science and against laws making it easier to teach creationism in public schools.

Today’s fundamentalists, with political support from the right wing, are more aggressive than ever in crusading to challenge evolution with the dogma of creationism. But they didn’t reckon on Zack Kopplin.

Starting at the grass roots in his home state of Louisiana, he’s become a formidable adversary nationally, speaking, debating, button-holing politicians, and winning the active support of Nobel laureates, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The New Orleans City Council and tens of thousands of students, teachers and others around the country who have signed on to his campaign. Troublemakers all. Zack is now 19 and a history major at Rice University in Houston. He’s with me now. Welcome to the show.

ZACK KOPPLIN: Thank you so much for having me on.

BILL MOYERS: What was it about the Louisiana Science Education Act that you didn’t like?

ZACK KOPPLIN: Well, this law allows supplemental materials into our public school biology classrooms to quote, “critique controversial theories,” like evolution and climate change. Now, evolution and climate change aren’t scientifically controversial, but they are controversial to Louisiana legislators. And basically, everyone who looked at this law knew it was just a backdoor to sneak creationism into public schoolscience classes.

BILL MOYERS: Who was behind it?

ZACK KOPPLIN: Nationally, there’s this group called the Discovery Institute. They’re a creationist think tank that’s been pushing these types of laws all around the country for years and years. They even tried to get one nationally included in George Bush’s No Child Left Behind with the Santorum amendment. And so they wrote this law and they passed it on locally to the Louisiana Family Forum, which is our affiliate of Focus on the Family. Senator Ben Nevers, who sponsored it, said the Louisiana Family Forum suggested the law to him because they wanted creationism discussed when talking about Darwin’s theory. So we know from the horse’s mouth exactly what this law is about.

BILL MOYERS: What’s your understanding now of creationism? What essentially does it hold?

ZACK KOPPLIN: Essentially it’s a denial of evolution, mainly based off a literal interpretation of Genesis.

BILL MOYERS: That God created the earth, a supernatural power intervened, and that’s where we and the universe came from?

ZACK KOPPLIN: Yes. And so there’re some versions that say the earth is less than 10,000 years old. There’re some where they’ve, creationists have adapted and said, “Well, we got in trouble in the court case when we said that, so we’ll say it’s millions of years old. But evolution still doesn’t happen. We were created in our present form.” And that’s intelligent design creationism. Intelligent design creationism is still creationism dressed up to look like it’s scientific, but it’s really not.

BILL MOYERS: When did you collide with this notion?

ZACK KOPPLIN: So the Louisiana Science Education Act passed back in 2008. It was the summer before my sophomore year in high school. And so I knew about it. My dad’s been involved in Louisiana politics my entire life, so it was a dinner conversation. We’d be, like, “We can’t believe this bad law is just, like, it’s passing. But Governor Jindal will never sign it.” We knew Governor Jindal. He’s a very smart man. He’s a Brown University biology major. And so we decided, “Okay, when it gets to him, he’ll veto it.”

BILL MOYERS: He’s also a Rhodes Scholar.

ZACK KOPPLIN: He’s a Rhodes Scholar, yeah. And so it got to Governor Jindal with overwhelming support. And Governor Jindal started voicing his support for intelligent design creationism, he signed the law and he’s defended it ever since. And we were shocked. So for about two years I sort of stewed over this law. I wanted to fight it. I talked to all my friends. And my friends knew I couldn’t stand this law. But I never really knew how to take it on at that point. I was still too young to really recognize I had a voice.

BILL MOYERS: At what point did you say that to yourself, “This is so important to me for my own reasons of conscience, that I’m going to make it my life as a young man.”

ZACK KOPPLIN: So, my senior year of high school, I had to do a senior project. And I had friends who learned how to cook healthy food, learned a new language. And I was just, like, none of that interests me. But you know what? But what got my attention was this law. And so on a whim, I sent an e-mail to Dr. Barbara Forrest, who’s an expert about, an expert on this issue. She—

BILL MOYERS: Teaches philosophy, doesn’t she?

ZACK KOPPLIN: She teaches philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana. So she was an expert witness at the Kitzmiller versus Dover trial, where—

BILL MOYERS: In Pennsylvania.

ZACK KOPPLIN: In Pennsylvania, where intelligent design creationism was ruled unconstitutional. And while it’s not a Supreme Court case and doesn’t have holding across the entire United States, it essentially has put a stop to intelligent design as a serious method of sneaking creationism into the classroom.

But, so she was an expert witness there and she happens to live 30 minutes away from me in Livingston Parish, a local hotbed of creationism. And so I sent an e-mail to her and said, “I’m a student at Baton Rouge Magnet High and I really want to fight this law.” And so she apparently looked me up to make sure I wasn’t a creationist plant and then set up a meeting with me. And we got going from there—

BILL MOYERS: A mole.

ZACK KOPPLIN: Yep. I didn’t really ever expect it to actually take off the way it did. I sent one e-mail, and suddenly this whole campaign began.

BILL MOYERS: Who else helped you?

ZACK KOPPLIN: I set up a meeting with Barbara and I asked her, “who should I talk to locally?” We worked out Senator Karen Carter Peterson, who represents a district in New Orleans. And she was one of the few votes against the law when it first passed. So I got her to agree to sponsor a repeal bill. And that was a great meeting. She just said, “Okay, like, when do we get started?” And that was just her response to me, “When do we get started.” So, I talked to her and I also talked to Barbara about if we wanted to bring some big names on board, who should I, like, who should I talk to? And one of the people she recommended was Sir Harry Kroto, who is a Nobel Laureate chemist at Florida State. And so I sent him an e-mail. And he immediately called, he sent me an e-mail back and said, “Hey, do you have time to talk on the phone, like, on Friday?” And so we set it up where I had written a letter for Nobel Laureate scientists to our state legislature. I talked to him. And I woke up the next morning with him and about ten other Nobel Laureates having signed the letter. And we just started building from there. And so we have 78 Nobel Laureate scientists onboard.

BILL MOYERS: But you haven’t repealed the law. It’s still in place.

ZACK KOPPLIN: I mean, we would, I would’ve liked the law to be repealed two years ago, or even five years ago now. But it’s going to be a long, tough fight. And I think we know that at this point.

BILL MOYERS: You realize that you’re bucking public opinion. The latest findings from Gallup last June are that 46 percent of Americans believe in creationism. 32 percent believe in evolution guided by God. I guess they would call that a form of intelligent design. And 15 percent believe in evolution without God’s help. You’re definitively in the minority.

ZACK KOPPLIN: I would say we’ve got about 54 percent that are in the majority because there’s a difference between intelligent design and what I think that second option about God guided evolutionists, which be theistic evolution. And there’s a lot of people who say that God has caused evolution to happen. But they don’t, that’s not actually intelligent design. Intelligent design specifically rejects evolution, especially on a large scale. Creationists like to break it up into micro, macro evolution. That’s not a legitimate thing. That’s not what scientists do. But that’s how they say, “We can’t accept change over millions of years.” And—

BILL MOYERS: And the theistic theory?

ZACK KOPPLIN: Theistic evolution is to say what the Catholic Church accepts, where Pope John Paul II said there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of faith. And they just say, “We think God started evolution. And it’s run the way scientists say it’s run.”

BILL MOYERS: Do you think the Gallup poll is simplistic?

ZACK KOPPLIN: I think it’s very simplistic.

BILL MOYERS: Doesn’t recognize the varieties of ideas on this subject—

ZACK KOPPLIN: Yes, having said that, the 46 percent who think the earth was formed in the last 10,000 years is a very scary number for me.

BILL MOYERS: Let me play you a clip from Representative Paul Broun of Georgia. He’s a member of Congress. You’ve heard of him, I’m sure. And this was his appearance at an event organized by the Liberty Baptists Church in his own state.

PAUL BROUN: God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that all that stuff I was taught about evolution, and embryology, and big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see there are a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the bible says.

BILL MOYERS: Representative Broun is a medical doctor. He is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. If he were sitting here instead of me, what would you say to him?

ZACK KOPPLIN: We need to change that attitude. I mean, we need to be teaching evolution and embryology and the big bang theory because, you know, while he may think they’re lies from the pit of hell, they’re not. They’re good, established science. And if our students don’t learn it, they’re going to be at a disadvantage to the rest of the world, to China, to Britain to France. And we’re not going to do what we need to really make the advances to keep our way of life and ensure the survival of the human race, if we don’t teach our students science.

He has the freedom to be educated and educate his children the way he sees it. But, we have to make a specific distinction. Not in the public schools, not in publicly funded private schools, like voucher schools. And definitely not educating other people’s children.

BILL MOYERS: You’ve taken this fight beyond the Louisiana law into the fight against school vouchers. Why?

ZACK KOPPLIN: I didn’t initially really care about school vouchers because I was fundamentally a science advocate. And I was worried about evolution. And then last summer I got, a friend sent me an article by Alternet that had exposed a school in Louisiana in this voucher program that was apparently using curriculum that taught the Loch Ness Monster disproved evolution, and the Loch Ness Monster was real.

And so it caught my attention. And I said, “Well, let me look into this more.” And so I pulled a list of the voucher schools off our department of education’s website and just started going through them. And I’d look up a school and look up its website. And I’d go find a school that said, “Scientists are sinful men.” And we are—

BILL MOYERS: Sinful?

ZACK KOPPLIN: Sinful. And they rejected the things like theories like the age of the earth and anything else they said anything that, like, that that goes against God’s word is an error. And so I found a school like that. I found a school that put in their student handbook that students had to defend creationism against traditional scientific theory. And so these are schools receiving millions in public money.

BILL MOYERS: Through vouchers—

ZACK KOPPLIN: Through vouchers—

BILL MOYERS: –transferring public funds from public schools to private religious schools.

ZACK KOPPLIN: And recently we, I exposed with MSNBC that over 300 schools in voucher programs in nine states and Washington DC are teaching creationism. We have schools that call evolution the way of the heathen. And so it’s become pretty clear if you create a voucher program, you’re just going to be funding creationism through the back door.

BILL MOYERS: Neal McCluskey at the Cato Institute writes, “Were Kopplin’s argument fundamentally that taxpayers should not have their money taken against their will to schools with which they might disagree, it would be one thing: vouchers do transfer taxpayer money, though they provide far more overall freedom than does public schooling. But Kopplin’s argument, like the arguments of so many people on numerous education issues, isn’t ultimately about freedom. It’s about prohibiting others from learning something he doesn’t like.”

ZACK KOPPLIN: I think Neal McCluskey is forgetting about the First Amendment fundamentally. We have a separation of church and state in this country. And creationism is fundamentally religious. And evolution is just science and is not religious.

And I think as you probably have discussed on the show, the free exercise of religion includes religion and non-religion. So this country is fundamentally secular. And there shouldn’t be, you, we shouldn’t bring in one specific, not even just Christianity, but one specific version of Christianity that would not teach what the Catholics, or the Hindus or the Muslims or the atheists believe in the public schools and teach it instead of established science.

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever wake up in the morning and say, “Hey, I’m only 19. I’ve got Rice, tough school to get out of and get started in my life, in my work. Why am I doing this?”

ZACK KOPPLIN: I don’t think it’s a choice. I think it’s something that has to be done. And I’m the one who’s in the right position to do it, so I’m going to do it.

BILL MOYERS: Well, Zack, I’ve enjoyed this conversation and I wish you well. Thank you for coming.

ZACK KOPPLIN: Thank you so much for having me on.

Bill Moyers Highlights Louisiana’s Innovative Progressives: Zack Kopplin and the Lafayette Pro-Fiber Movement ¹

On Friday, legendary PBS host Bill Moyers will sit down with my friend and a young man who is increasingly becoming one of the leading education and science advocates in the nation, Zack Kopplin. In only two short years, Zack has catapulted his activism into international acclaim. Last week, Zack addressed more than 10,000 people at the Save Texas School rally in Austin:

And again, on Friday, he will be interviewed by the Great Bill Moyers on PBS (so set your TIVOs). Here’s a preview:

A couple of weeks ago, Moyers’s show also focused on the innovative and incredible work being done in Lafayette, Louisiana, featuring another one of my dear friends, Stephen Handwerk. It’s a great story, and you should watch it in its entirety.

Louisiana College Announces Emergency Board Meeting on February 25th; Here’s the LC Board ⁶

According the website Blow the Whistle, L.C., Louisiana College just announced an unprecedented emergency board meeting, ostensibly to discuss the recent controversies related to President Joe Aguillard’s decision to refuse to extend the contracts of three divinity school professors who allegedly have advanced and espoused a type of Calvinism in their scholarship and his administration’s decision to actively investigate graduate divinity school students for criticizing Aguillard’s decisions, apparently alleging that these students may have violated the Student Handbook, which prohibits students from saying anything and everything that may be perceived to be “disparaging” against the school, an Orwellian and dictatorially broad statement that effectively penalizes and punishes students who dare to speak out.

Commenters on the Save Our LC online forum have reason to be optimistic (quoting):

According to the Whistleblower site, an emergency board meeting will commence next Monday, the 25th. One has to wonder whether this is the end for this administration. What are the chances the board will pay off the prez and send him packing? Might he announce his retirement, effective graduation day? Or, will he somehow politically survive the latest round of accusations of mistreatment of employees and students?

This board must feel “up against it.” Decries from preachers about the Calvinism, from students that their beloved professors have been mistreated. Oh, what a difficult time to be a trustee. These are the yields of less than courageous leadership. This is what unprincipled, political hacketry gets you. Do the right thing, guys/gals. Let him exit with grace, even though he didn’t grant that to others. Renew the contracts. Express support for the students. Find a president from far away who knows a little something about higher ed.

The speculation is, of course, the Louisiana College Board members will finally see the writing that’s been indelibly written on the wall, and remove Joe Aguillard from his Presidency. It remains to be seen whether the Board will muster enough bravery and loyalty needed to oust Joe Aguillard’s fractious and divisive leadership so soon, but it is a good sign.

The Whistle Blower website encouraged students and concerned citizens to contact three specific board members.

I’ll take it a step further: Contact all of them!

Without further delay, here they are, the Trustees of Louisiana College:

1. Roy Davis- North Shreve, Shreveport

2. James Foster- Utility, Jonesville

3. Jim Garlington- Oak Grove, Bentley

4. Michael Moore (no, not that Michael Moore)- Mooringsport, Mooringsport

5. Tommy French- Jefferson, Baton Rouge

6. David Willoughby- Calvary, Monroe

7. Mark Taylor- Cook, Ruston

8. Tony Perkins- Greenwell Springs, Baton Rouge

9. Steve Folma- First, Houma

10. Lonnie Scarborough- Fair Park, West Monroe

11. Jerry Chaddick- Open Door, Moss Bluff

12. Jill Kidder- Istrouma, Baton Rouge

13. Mike Francis- East Bayou, Lafayette

14. Jack Hunter- First, New Orleans

15. Glenn Wilkins- Martin, Coushatta

16. Kris Chenier- Trinity Heights, Shreveport

17. Lyndon Dawson- First, Ruston

18. Ryan Gregory- First, Oak Grove

19. Carlton Vance- Philadelphia, Deville

20. Ray Werfine- Ebenezer, Hammond

21. Glenn George- First, Gillis

22. Sam Camp- First, Covington

23. Blake Cooper- Calvary, Alexandria

24. Clay Crenshaw- First, Bossier City

25. Roxanne West- First, Pine Prairie

26. Larry Allen- Hosston, Hosston

27. Jay Adkins- First, Westwego

28. John Walker- Antioch, Mansfield

29. Barry Bieber- New Prospect, Dry Prong

30. Shawn Thomas- First, Moss Bluff

31. Heath Veuleman- The Gathering Place, Tioga

Unfunded, Unaccountable, and Unconstitutional: John White’s Scheme to Push Louisiana’s Voucher Program ⁵

Less than three months after Judge Tim Kelley ruled that Louisiana’s school voucher program was unconstitutionally funded and only a month before oral arguments begin in the Louisiana State Supreme Court, Superintendent of Education John White announced that his Department had added nineteen additional schools to the program and was now accepting applications for next year.

Consider this: Last year, John White and the Department of Education waited until mid-summer before opening up the application process for the controversial program. By green-lighting applications now, Superintendent White is cynically and unabashedly attempting to pressure the Louisiana State Supreme Court, the Louisiana legislature, and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. It’s an unnecessarily provocative and preemptive strike, a blatantly political scheme to undermine the autonomy and authority of the Court and establish and expand a class of victims, those students and parents who applied for vouchers that were never legal or constitutional in the first place.

And if you somehow doubt that Superintendent White would so cynically exploit parents and children to help advance his and Governor Jindal’s political agenda, then also consider this: He is opening up applications for next year before revealing which schools will be kicked out of the program for academic failure. Quoting from The Times-Picayune:

The state Supreme Court is set to hear arguments the week of March 18 in a case that will determine whether Gov. Bobby Jindal must find a new way to fund the Louisiana Scholarship Program. And parents may find that some schools will initially enroll students only to turn them away later. The reason: The key measure for determining whether schools may take more voucher students — an academic performance score similar to the one given to public schools statewide — won’t be ready until May even though the voucher lottery will take place in April.

State Education Superintendent John White defends the decision to go ahead with a second year of the program. The best way to serve students is to make every public school great, he told reporters Wednesday. But until that has been achieved, “It is our moral obligation to provide them with every alternative,” he said.

You got that? Superintendent John White is morally obligated to allow students to apply for vouchers that will likely be held unconstitutional (and therefore unfunded) for schools that may or may not be failing.

Apply now; ask questions later.

Incidentally, Superintendent White has approved at least one other private school that promotes Biblical creationism as legitimate science, Alfred Booker Junior Academy, bringing the total number of identified creationist voucher schools to twenty-one. The inclusion of Alfred Booker Junior Academy also demonstrates how incredibly unserious and reckless John White’s leadership continues to be. After being nationally exposed and embarrassed by Zack Kopplin for his lackadaisical and borderline negligent standards, John White approved a school that teaches mathematics like this:

Mathematics:

(Grades K-5) Go Math! Common Core curriculum was developed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to point our students to the Creator. From Genesis to Revelation, God used math in awesome ways. Creation was completed in six (6) days and commemorated on the seventh. Elisha was able to multiply the widow’s oil and Peter was encouraged to forgive “seventy times seven.”

Our taxpayer dollars at work.

Superintendent White also claimed that all schools approved under the voucher program must be accredited, and when 52 unaccredited schools applied for funding, he rejected only two.

But here’s the real story, something that I hope the mainstream media will break wide open: According to well-placed sources involved in education policy in Louisiana, Superintendent White, Governor Jindal, and their allies on BESE are working on a contingency plan in the event that the voucher program is ruled unconstitutional.

It’s a simple plan, actually, but to understand it, you need to know three things:

First, Louisiana’s voucher program is currently being funded through the State’s Minimum Foundation Program.

Second, the Minimum Foundation Program, according to the Louisiana State Constitution, is strictly intended to finance public education. (That’s the heart of the legal challenge, and if you can read the English language, it’s pretty open and shut).

And third, if the State Supreme Court affirms and upholds Judge Tim Kelley’s well-considered ruling that the voucher program is unconstitutionally funded, then vouchers must instead be funded through the State’s General Fund, which has been decimated under Governor Jindal’s leadership.

The solution to this, if the rumors are to be trusted and believed, is that Superintendent White and Governor Jindal convince the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) to change the formula used for calculating MFP funding. Hypothetically, if BESE can shave off $80M- $120M a year from MFP, then the State could then realize those savings in its General Fund and assign the money to the voucher program.

For what it’s worth, I think the scheme is inherently and blatantly unconstitutional, but I’m not at all surprised that the concept is being bandied about as a contingency plan. The Louisiana State Constitution is clear, however. Quoting (bold mine):

Minimum Foundation Program. The State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or its successor, shall annually develop and adopt a formula which shall be used to determine the cost of a minimum foundation program of education in all public elementary and secondary schools as well as to equitably allocate the funds to parish and city school systems. Such formula shall provide for a contribution by every city and parish school system. Prior to approval of the formula by the legislature, the legislature may return the formula adopted by the board to the board and may recommend to the board an amended formula for consideration by the board and submission to the legislature for approval. The legislature shall annually appropriate funds sufficient to fully fund the current cost to the state of such a program as determined by applying the approved formula in order to insure a minimum foundation of education in all public elementary and secondary schools. Neither the governor nor the legislature may reduce such appropriation, except that the governor may reduce such appropriation using means provided in the act containing the appropriation provided that any such reduction is consented to in writing by two-thirds of the elected members of each house of the legislature. The funds appropriated shall be equitably allocated to parish and city school systems according to the formula as adopted by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or its successor, and approved by the legislature prior to making the appropriation. Whenever the legislature fails to approve the formula most recently adopted by the board, or its successor, the last formula adopted by the board, or its successor, and approved by the legislature shall be used for the determination of the cost of the minimum foundation program and for the allocation of funds appropriated.

La. Const. art. VIII, § 13

Notably, the only way the Governor can legally reduce the MFP appropriation is through a two-thirds vote of the legislature, something that he’d be unlikely to accomplish. But if Jindal’s hand-selected and well-funded BESE members somehow, magically determine to conveniently reduce the MFP appropriation by the exact amount needed to finance the voucher program, it becomes a little murkier.

Actually, “murkier” is a polite word; if this is, in fact, Jindal’s and White’s contingency plan– working around a potential defeat in the Louisiana State Supreme Court by defunding the very program upon which they had relied– then it would be nothing more than open Corruption (with a capital C).

In the meantime, one can only hope Superintendent White will wise up; after all, it’s his moral obligation.

Bobby Jindal’s Catastrophic Negligence: Coastal Restoration Funds Squandered ²

A few years ago, the good people who conduct the U.S. Geological survey realized that the most powerful and effective way to describe the destruction of the Louisiana coastline was to put it in a language that we all understand: Football. Right now, in Louisiana, we lose an entire football field every hour due to coastal erosion.

The destruction of the Louisiana coast and marshlands is, without question, the single largest existential threat to the state’s economy, culture, habitat, and environment. And it’s made all the more insidious because this destruction is gradual (to mix environmental metaphors, you could also say, it’s glacier). We don’t experience it in real-time; it cannot be documented as dramatically as melting icebergs plunging into to the frigid Arctic Ocean. In Louisiana, coastal erosion is tracked through the never-ending, seemingly peaceful, and somnambulant sounds of waves lapping up and then receding on small, uninhabitable marshlands, most of which are at least a hundred miles from any sign of human civilization.

Quoting from The Times-Picayune (back in 2011):

“If that loss were to occur at a constant rate, it would be equal to losing more land than the island of Manhattan every year,” Couvillion said.

Preliminary measurements for the years 2009 and 2010 indicate what could be the beginning of a positive trend: a loss of only 3 square miles of wetlands.

To be fair, we’ve been able to curb some of this destruction through targeted infrastructure investments, rebuilding and repairing far-flung marshes, and no doubt, the coast is continually imperiled by large-scale hurricanes and storms. Quoting again:

That rapid loss rate was likely from several causes, Turnipseed and Couvillion said. Subsidence in wetlands in the Barataria Basin quickly followed the rapid drawdown of oil and gas beneath them. But part of the loss was likely the result of what Couvillion refers to as “sediment deprivation.”

“We built levees and sediment is no longer allowed to get out there and sustain these marshes and help them keep up with sea level rise and the subsidence that may have been in part related to oil and gas extraction,” he said. The loss of sediment also is liked to the rapid development of dams for hydropower and other purposes on the Missouri and upper Mississippi rivers, which captured sand and dirt that would otherwise have traveled to Louisiana.

But the inconvenient truth, to borrow a term from Vice President Al Gore, is that coastal erosion in Louisiana is largely the result of man-made interventions: Levee systems that rerouted the depositing of critical sediment, the building blocks of our marshes, into other areas; the industrialization of our gulf waterways and channels in order to accommodate the oil and gas extraction industry; the construction of large electric dams further upstream.

Yesterday, we learned that during the last two years, Governor Jindal has raided nearly $45 million from the Rigs-to-Reefs fund, which, as its name implies, requires rig operators to contribute a certain portion of their income to create and develop infrastructure projects along the Louisiana coast that could offset some of this destruction. But instead of spending that $45 million on needed coastal restoration projects, Jindal pilfered from the fund in order to offset losses in the State’s General Fund. Thankfully, the Board of the Artificial Reef Fund is now speaking out and making it abundantly clear that, for them, Jindal’s use of their monies is unconstitutional. Quoting (bold mine):

One such program is the Artificial Reef Development Fund, also known as the Rigs to Reefs Program. Since 2010, Jindal has taken $45 million fromthe fund to cover budget overruns, and after sitting on their hands for a few years, the commission that oversees the program is considering fighting against the governor who appointed them in order to recover the money.

The Wildlife and Fisheries Commission held a closed-door session today in Baton Rouge to consider filing suit. The board, which is entirely comprised of Jindal appointees, did not take any action on the matter Thursday, but its leaders say they are convinced that the governor’s use of the money violates the state Constitution.

“It’s in the Conservation Fund and the Conservation Fund is protected by the Constitution,” said Ronny Graham, the board’s newly installed chairman. “The money that comes into the Rigs to Reefs Program or the donation to the Conservation Fund into that, it specifically says it should be used for that program.”

The fund was set up to collect donations from oil companies when their offshore rigs come to the end of their useful lives.

The companies agreed to give the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries the old rigs and half the money they would have spent to disassemble and remove them so the state can pay to move the structures and turn them into fisheries habitats.

Every act of donation explicitly says the money is “to be placed in the Artificial Reef Fund for the benefit of the Louisiana Artificial Reef Development Program.”

Jindal offered this pathetic response (again, bold mine):

“We’re confident that the law has allowed for unused, excess dollars to be used to protect higher education and health care,” said Kristy Nichols, Jindal’s commissioner of administration. “Any time we use statutory funds in this way, we ensure that the core mission of the fund is protected.”

And maybe, to some, that sounds legitimate: “Unused, excess dollars” paying for education and heath care,” says Team Jindal. But unfortunately, for Jindal, that is not even remotely true. From WWLTV (bold mine):

But, as conservative budget hawk Rep. Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, points out, the core mission of the fund is not education or health care in any way. In fact, the oil companies are promised that the donations will go only to building the reefs.

“The oil companies are paying into this for a specific purpose and our constituents believe we’re taking this money and using it the best to save the coast,” Henry said. “I mean, that’s what Louisiana needs to do, and we’re not going that route.”

And Henry also notes that the administration did not use the money exclusively for education and health care. In fact, news reports in 2010 said that more than $12 million of the $18 million taken from the fund that year financed legislative pork.

“They’ve used it for slush funds, for projects for members (of the Legislature),” Henry said.

Henry and another conservative legislator, Rep. Kirk Talbot, R-River Ridge, have already sued the state attorney general and treasurer for what they say are Constitutional violations in the use of hundreds of millions of dollars from one-time revenue funds, including the Artificial Reef Fund.

“The Handgun Permit Fund, the Litter Abatement Fund — all these permits we have that people pay into when you get your driver’s license or your conceal and carry permit, used for a specific purpose — and the administration goes in at the end of the year and sweeps those funds and uses it for their discretion,” Henry said.

According to Representative Henry and Representative Talbot, Governor Jindal is not reallocating surplus monies from the Artificial Reef Fund in order to pay for education and health care; he’s unconstitutionally pilfering from the Rigs to Reef program to provide slush funds for unrelated projects to members of the legislature.

Then again, why would Jindal care about reef restoration and construction when he, alone, possesses the most brilliant coastal restoration plan in Louisiana history: Forcing BP, in the immediate aftermath of the Deep Water Horizon fiasco to fork over $220M to construct sand berms, berms that would not only trap the oil washing on our shores, but berms that could also serve as a steady, long-term investment in rebuilding precious infrastructure in our most environmentally vulnerable places.

Except that: Jindal’s sand berm project was a failure of epic failure, a failure so open and obvious that it seemed like a foregone conclusion before the first shovel hit the ground. Quoting USA Today:

The presidential commission investigating the BP Gulf of Mexico spill has concluded that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal wasted $220 million building controversial sand berms that captured a “minuscule amount” of oil and proved to be “underwhelmingly effective” and “overwhelmingly expensive.”

The 36 miles of berms, constructed over the objections of many scientists and federal agencies, trapped only about 1,000 barrels of oil out of the nearly 5 million barrels that spilled between April and July, the National Oil Spill Commission said in a draft report released today.

Jindal later responded:

This report is partisan revisionist history at taxpayer expense.

The Commission would do a true service to Americans by recommending federal bureaucracies that can be eliminated or expedited in times of major disasters – like Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, instead of attacking the politics of Louisiana and Huey Long.

The report’s assertion that the berms did not pass the commission’s “cost benefit analysis” is insulting to the thousands of people whose way of life depends on the health of our working coast. What exactly is the cost of thousands of jobs and generations of fishermen and oyster harvesters who have made their living off of our coast for over 100 years? I would like the Administration to provide us with an estimate of the ‘cost’ that they did not deem worthy of every action possible to protect coastal families.

We are thrilled that this has become the state’s largest barrier island restoration project in history.

Here is Jindal’s photographic evidence that his initiative saved thousands of jobs and generations of fishermen and oyster harvesters:

What Do Creationists and Holocaust Deniers Have In Common? ⁵

Yesterday, in a conversation on Facebook, I asked my cousin Bryan, a young and exceptionally gifted Presbyterian preacher, a series of purposely provocative questions about the scientific validity of creationism and intelligent design. Bryan, unlike most people on both sides of this debate, possesses an astonishingly open mind and empathetic view on this subject, a subject that, as I subsequently learned, is fraught with rhetorical landmines, a subject that lends itself to insulting stereotyping and generalizations, and as Bryan aptly put it, “morally reprehensible analogies.” Bryan and I are both relatively close in age, and although we are members of the same loyal family, we approach this subject from very different perspectives.

As a disclaimer, I posed the question in the headline, “What Do Creationists and Holocaust Deniers Have In Common?” not because I believe they actually have anything in common, but because the question, with its loaded cultural implications, to many, borders on the “morally reprehensible,” and, in so doing, deserves to be unpacked.

If you’re offended by any of this, I can only earnestly express that the purpose of engaging in this discussion is not to advance an ad hominem attack against those who believe, as an article of their religious beliefs, in New Earth Creationism or its subsequently re-engineered brother, “Intelligent Design.” It’s not to condescendingly or offensively suggest that a belief in New Earth Creationism is just like denying the Holocaust; that’s insulting and completely off-the-mark.

But the question should provoke a serious, unemotional, objective analysis about curriculum standards in American schools, both public and private. For over two years, Zack Kopplin and I have worked together and in concert with many other bloggers, small newspaper journalists, and independent publications in exposing the ways in which taxpayer money has helped to subsidize schools with absurdly anti-science agendas and curricula. Zack, as most of you know, has done almost all of the heavy lifting on researching and identifying the actual schools, while others, myself included, have focused on the machinations of the policy leaders, lawmakers, and courts. We recently learned that House Speaker John Boehner plans on making the expansion of school vouchers into a platform issue, promising that this debate will continue and that, hopefully, means more national attention will be provided to the already-broken voucher program in Louisiana, part of a package of reforms introduced and passed by Governor Jindal that has recently been declared unconstitutional by three different courts for three different reasons.

As distasteful and offensive as the Holocaust deniers analogy may seem (it’s such a morally repulsive idea that no sane historian would ever attempt to equivocate the truth of the Holocaust with radical conspiracy theories), we would be naive if we summarily discounted that denial without understanding its origins and its import. For a great many in the radicalized Middle East, Holocaust denial is a centerpiece in education policy, domestic policy, and international affairs. We are nearly seventy years removed from the Holocaust, and I suspect that, within my lifetime, I’ll one day read about the death of the last remaining survivor.

We know the Holocaust is true, because many of us lived through it. To be sure, I am far too young to remember the Holocaust, but when I was eighteen, a group of friends and I trekked through the Dachau Concentration Camp, one of the saddest but most illuminating moments of my young life: Confronting the vestiges of undeniable evil, the inhumanly cramped boarding rooms, the crematoriums, the gas chambers, the cast-iron sign emblazoned with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei.” A place that still smelled like soot and death and dust. This was not a Hollywood set. If I had possessed even a fragment of a thought about the remote possibility of a massive conspiracy, it was forever extinguished that afternoon. Dachau is a vivid, permanent, real place on our planet; Holocaust deniers are idiots.

Dachau Concentration Camp, outside of Munich, Germany

As a kid, in junior high, I visited Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, which, by then looked more like a well-manicured lawn, a place that some could possibly mistake as a pastoral field perfect for a golf course.

The battlefield at Gettysburg

Creationist advocacy groups, led principally by the Discovery Institute, challenge American elected officials to “teach the controversy.” But, the problem is: there is no controversy. They’ve marketed their own religious beliefs as an alternative to well-established science, and they’re lying. Creationism and its slightly edited twin Intelligent Design aren’t science; they’re religion. And in these United States of America, public institutions are charged with adhering to the Establishment Clause.

My brother and I both collect ancient rocks, stones, and fossils. I have a trilobite that is over 250 million years old and a small fragment from a 2 billion year old meteorite that seems to magically emit some sort of strange magnetic charge. If, for some reason, a New Earth Creationist visits my home and challenges me to provide evidence that the universe is older than 6,000 years, I have ample evidence displayed without adornment on one of my bookshelves. I don’t worship these ancient fossils as deities; they are not symbols of the metaphysical. They’re just old, and they look cool.

A trilobite

So, the question is– particularly to those New Earth Creationists who seek to advance their decidedly and definitively religious agenda in our science classrooms and, more specifically, to those who are offended by analogies to Holocaust deniers: How can we talk about what SHOULD be admitted as valid science or valid history in the classroom, without also discussing the things we’ve rejected as manifestly invalid?

Captioning The Top Six Best Lines From James Varney’s Editorial On Jindal ¹

From The Times-Picayune:

1.

”Foremost – not least in Jindal’s mind, most likely – is a charismatic, articulate spokesman.” James Varney

2.

“This process is more difficult for conservatives than liberals because the scribblers who craft “the narrative” are anti-conservative.(The Boston Globe’s online headline on the Jindal speech is an excellent example.).” James Varney

3.

“When an election hinges on fewer than a half-million votes in a handful of states, and the opposition has painted you there as a dog-hating, filthy rich, tax-dodging, cancer-stricken-wife killing felon, well, that’s a steep hill to climb.” James Varney

4.

“Yet in terms of what is being offered, Jindal already has a much more innovative track record than Obama. It is, and has been for some time, the Democrats who seek the preservation of a creaky system that can be kept on life support only with massive cash infusions.” James Varney

5.

“Yet in terms of what is being offered, Jindal already has a much more innovative track record than Obama.” James Varney

6.

(Federal projections)

“All of which underscores the great irony of the 2012 election: Should Obama’s vision be implemented, it will make real Romney’s most infamous comment about the “47 percent.” For now, that figure – which only includes non-payers of federal income tax – is in flux, and I’ve argued it’s false to say everyone in that club wants to be a member.

“But under Obama’s ‘fundamental transformation of America,’ that figure is sure to rise. With Obama rigidly sticking to bankrupt formulas, more and more people will become “takers.” His philosophy holds that the government is the best – and in an increasingly complex and competitive world, the only – arbiter of “fairness.” Obama would cement a system that runs until the expensive redistribution of everything creates a vast, gray mediocrity for all save the brilliant controllers.” – James Varney

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27	28	29	30	31

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Spread the word

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Spread the word

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Spread the word

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