The editorial board of the Texas newspaper The Austin American-Statesman wrote a wonderful and wondrous editorial lambasting the Texas Education Agency. The TEA administration is a bunch of craven cowards who forced Chris Comer to resign recently because she sent out an email promoting a talk that would focus on the deception of Intelligent Design.
The money shot (emphasis mine):
Politicizing the Texas Education Agency, which oversees the education of children in public schools, would be a monumental mistake.This isn’t the space to explore the debate over creationism, intelligent design and evolution. Each approach should be fair game for critical analysis, so terminating someone for just mentioning a critic of intelligent design smacks of the dogma and purges in the Soviet era.
This is pretty much on the money. Irony factor: many fundamentalists like to mention that Stalin was an atheist, which is why he could be so evil. What is TEA’s excuse?
Oh, and here is another fun tidbit:
The person who called for Comer to be fired is Lizzette Reynolds, a former deputy legislative director for Gov. George Bush. She joined the state education agency this year as an adviser after a stint in the U.S. Department of Education.
Shocker.
The more this story sees the light of day, the more that light will cause the noisome and repellent methodologies of the religious right to wither and die. I sometimes fear that publicizing their evil ways will force them to be sneakier about it, but from stories like this it becomes apparent they aren’t intelligent enough (or they are simply too arrogant) to operate in such a manner. It’s almost as if they are doing the rational-based community a service by being so spectacularly ham-fisted in their censorship and McCarthyism.
It does make it obvious what hypocrites they are. Educators, indeed.
