Civil Commotion

It seems that the Republican legislature in the Buckeye State has passed a measure which excuses high school students from learning the rudiments of biology — specifically, evolution — so long as they are sincere in their ignorance.

Ohio lawmakers are weighing in on how public schools can teach things like evolution.

The Ohio House on Wednesday passed the “Student Religious Liberties Act.” Under the law, students can’t be penalized if their work is scientifically wrong as long as the reasoning is because of their religious beliefs.

Instead, students are graded on substance and relevance.

Ohio has a bicameral legislature, so all is not lost; it’s at least possible that the state Senate will reject this nonsense.

I don’t doubt that lot of Ohioans like the sound of this bill, but they’re not going to like it at all when they realize that protecting ignorance undermines their manufacturing base and, even, modern agriculture.

The Bible is not what Evangelicals claim it is. Educated Evangelical preachers know this, yet on Sundays they play make-believe, leading congregants to think that the Bible is the very words of God/Jesus. These preachers know this is a lie, but their identity and economic well being are based on perpetuating this untruth Sunday after Sunday. They must not tell congregants the truth lest they find out the emperor has no clothes. Evangelical preachers know that if their charges question the purity and veracity of the Holy Bible, why, what’s next? Questions are the slippery slope that leads to liberalism and apostasy. For these preachers, better to lie than to cause people to lose their faith.

Bruce Gerencser

This quote points toward something I’ve wondered about for years: Which of these guys are idiots, and which are whores specialized in servicing idiots? I’ll be damned if I know, or if I’ve ever managed to devise a good test for distinguishing between them.

There is a further issue here. The whole of Christian thought rests on Original Sin — the teaching that …

• Y’all are no damn good

• Y’all were born no damn good

• Y’all can never be any damn good

• And the only way to avoid the eternal punishment you deserve — Yay! Salvation! — is to join the correct club.

No healthy adult is going to accept such a preposterous teaching; Christianity needs for people to be troubled in order to spread and thrive. And I wonder how many preachers have thought about their own words carefully enough to recognize that, and how many cynically exploit the troubled?

Paige Patterson, a leader of the SBC’s so-called Conservative Resurgence and fired as the head of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for mishandling sexual misconduct complaints, now faces fire for a letter written upon the election of the denomination’s first black president.

There are a great many reasons to dislike Paige Patterson, and he deserved to be fired, but I’m not certain this letter is so awful as it is being construed. After all, according to the letter, the first black president is charged with appointing minorities to other positions of responsibility within the denomination — and religious beliefs are not informed by only theology (a dubious branch of ‘knowledge’ to begin with) but also culture. The Resurgence was, certainly, a southern conservative and white project, and I suspect that what the letter really points to is the uneasy relationship between theology and culture, and Patterson’s difficulty keeping them separate.

This is interesting: Responding to member pressure, the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America have cancelled publication on their Web sites of a job advertisement from Brigham Young University. The reason is that BYU has an honor code which prohibits same-sex relationships.

Two well-known scientific groups have dropped job postings from their websites from Brigham Young University because of the school’s LGBTQ policies, igniting a debate on whether research organizations should take a stance on social issues.

The Washington-based American Geophysical Union and the Colorado-based Geological Society of America took down the ads amid mounting pressure from members, the Salt Lake Tribune reported Monday.

I admit it: Since my first degree is in Geological Engineering, I felt a thrill of pride that geologists stood-up for science.

The simple, settled, incontestable fact is that the many components of sexuality are hard-coded before birth, and PHOOEY! on that ridiculous old book and its carrying-on about sin-sin-sin. If BYU refuses to acknowledge the settled fact, then their job advertisement has no more dignity than a job advertisement for Hogwarts and should be treated with the same disdain.

Before Donald Trump was even inaugurated, I urged professionals to leave government service if they could and refuse to work for Donald Trump if a position were offered.

Today, tens of thousands of professionals employed by the federal government are asking themselves: Should I stay, or should I go?

A column by Ross Douthat in Friday’s New York Times says, basically, “Stay. A minority of Americans have somehow contrived to elect an expedient ignoramus who is deeply hostile to your country’s ideals, and now your country needs you more than ever.” A column by David Leonhardt in today’s New York Times echoes Douthat’s argument.

We need your professionalism, your expertise, your respect for democratic norms and American values. Stay on. Stay on, please, for your country.

Well.

Certainly, I agree that we have elected an incompetent and ignorant proto-fascist with the instincts of a cheap thug. I sharply disagree that an honorable professional can or should serve under his administration.

What do you know? Those who sought a middle position between service and avoidance are the targets of especial scorn. Consider this editorial in Tuesday’s New York Times.

Then there’s Anonymous, the White House insider who wrote an Op-Ed essay for The Times in September 2018, followed by a book to be released later this month, positioning the author as part of a noble “resistance” within the administration. These officials supported many of the president’s policies, Anonymous wrote in the essay:

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

This kind of thinking may help the Tillersons and Kellys sleep better at night. But it is a weak excuse for propping up a president who continues to erode democratic norms and the rule of law.

I take the point, but think it’s overly harsh. These workers are in exactly the vise I predicted they would be in: From one side they are feeling pressure from a lawfully elected president, and from the other they have to deal with the reality that the lawfully elected president is a corrupt and ignorant madman and obeying his orders does very grave harm.

They are making the best of an appalling situation, and they are doing it knowing that a shocking proportion of the Congress is unwilling to uphold the norms of decent, democratic society or, even, American ideals. It was anticipating just such a circumstance that I argued professionals should refuse to serve in this administration.

True, if they had taken my advice a lot of contractors would have waited a long time to get paid, a lot of floors would have gone unswept, a lot of decisions would have been delayed, a lot of terrorists would not have been foiled — but they wouldn’t be taking abuse from editorials and the GOP. What is more, today there would be no denying Donald Trump’s thoroughgoing incompetence and authoritarian indifference to the country’s well-being, and even the GOP would be panting to get rid of him.

The professionals who perform government service should not be in the position of having to choose between letting the government break and fail outright, or suffer partisan abuse for their efforts to keep it staggering along in the face of systemic incompetence and lawlessness.

One more thing: As the date stamp on the prior post I linked-to shows, it was clear long before the inauguration that Trump is incompetent, that Trump is corrupt, that responsible professionals in his government would be cruelly whipsawed. I do think that those who stayed, and those who signed-up, made a foolish and avoidable error (at least with respect to their personal well-being). But I am sure that the majority of those who made that error did so from good faith optimism — Could Trump really be that awful? — and they don’t deserve now to be bashed for their trusting, honorable intentions.