Tennessee "Teaching the Controversy" Bill Becomes Law

MrKevvy writes "The Tennessee 'Teaching the Controversy' bill was passed into law today. 'A law to allow public school teachers to challenge the scientific consensus on issues like climate change and evolution will soon take effect in Tennessee. State governor Bill Haslam allowed the bill — passed by the state House and Senate — to become law without signing it, saying he did not believe the legislation "changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools."'" The governor adds: "However, I also don’t believe that it accomplishes anything that isn’t already acceptable in our schools."

Comments

Re:Invitation to partisan flame-wars is unproducti

[Arrogant-Bastard]

I'll go a step further: religious people aren't "people", per se. They've failed the qualifying intelligence test for classification as "homo sapiens". Accordingly, they should be treated in the same way as other inferior primates: humanely, of course, but there's no way they should be granted citizenship, suffrage or human rights.

This is, as you might guess, not a popular viewpoint (even among my fellow atheists). But before you reject it outright, or label it as flame-bait (which is NOT how it's intended), consider that religion in 2012 consist of a limited set of Bronze-age superstitions that have managed to survive -- out of a larger set, most of which didn't. As Bertrand Russell so astutely observed: "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence. It will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." We are slowly (very slowly, unfortunately) seeing that happen -- which is an entirely good thing, as any species which does not discard religion is doomed. But it's not happening without a prolonged struggle, because of course those in positions of religious power are as reluctant to surrender their positions as those in political or economic power. We have a long way to go before eveyone on this planet who actually thinks they're a human manages to meet the criteria for truly being so.

Re:He should have vetoed it.

[BitZtream]

No, it never should have made it through the house and senate, he did what he was supposed to do and didn't have an opinion on it.

Do you have any fucking clue at all how your government works? Governers and presidents don't make or break laws you moron, congress does, when a stupid law is created its a congresscritters fault.

Jesus christ when will you people start fucking paying attention to who actually runs the fucking country rather than who is supposed to enforce the laws of the country? Presidents and Governers DON'T FUCKING RUN THE COUNTRY, THEY ENFORCE LAWS, STOP FUCKING VOTING LIKE THEY MAKE THE GOD DAMN LAWS YOU MORON.

Re:Teach the controversy

[mvdwege]

Of course there is no controversy among the scientists. They want the grant money gravy train to continue.

Mart