*sigh* more news from Texas
 

More sillyness from my adopted home state...

(This is copyrighted by the Houston Chronicle)


"It would appear that even hinting that intelligent design is religion masquerading as science is forbidden at the Texas Education Agency.

Chris Castillo Comer, a veteran science teacher and for nine years the TEA's director of science curriculum, was forced to resign for what seems like the most trivial of offenses: forwarding an e-mail announcement to her contacts of an upcoming talk by an author of a book critical of the intelligent design movement.

With a State Board of Education review of the science portion of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills scheduled early next year, Comer's ouster could portend a renewed effort to establish creationism and intelligent design as science class fare.

Creationism contends that the natural world was created by a deity, while intelligent design seeks to explain evolution as a process set in motion by that creator. The writer whose presentation was mentioned in the e-mail is Barbara Forrest, the coauthor of Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse, and a key witness in a Pennsylvania case that challenged the inclusion of intelligent design in a school district's curriculum. In forwarding the event announcement sent by a pro-evolution group called the National Center for Science Education, Comer was simply alerting people to a relevant presentation by a reputable education writer.

That's not how Lizzette Reynolds, a former U.S. Department of Education employee saw it. Reynolds, the TEA's senior adviser on statewide initiatives for less than a year, fired off a memo calling for Comer's termination less than two hours after the e-mail had been sent. "This is something that the State Board, the governor's office and members of the Legislature would be extremely upset to see because it assumes this is a subject the agency supports," Reynolds wrote."


WW

Water will grind away huge mountains, and dogged blind idiocy can as well.

WW, what you label mere "sillyness", I find "malevolence". Ah, well, the real question is what, if anything, you as a resident of Texas can do about it, whatever it's called.

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