California teacher guilty of denying Creationism

[tangaroa]

To quote the AP's lede:

A federal judge has ruled that a Mission Viejo history teacher violated the First Amendment by telling students that creationism is "superstitious nonsense."

Of course, Creationism is superstitious nonsense and the teacher would doing his students a favour by explaining why it is. You can get a copy of the ruling on the Orange County Register website. The judge in this case is James V. Selna. The teacher is James C. Corbett of Capistrano Valley High School, and the student who brought the lawsuit is Chad Farnan.

From the ruling, we learn that Corbett's offensive statement referred to an earlier dispute over creationism with former Capistrano Valley High School science teacher John Peloza.

Peloza apparently brought suit against Corbett because Corbett was the advisor to a student newspaper which ran an article suggesting that Peloza was teaching religion rather than science in his classroom. Corbett explained to his class that Peloza, a teacher, "was not telling the kids the scientific truth about evolution." Corbett also told his students that, in response to a request to give Peloza space in the newspaper to present his point of view, Corbett stated, "I will not leave John Peloza alone to propagandize kids with this religious, superstitious nonsense." [...]

This statement was found by Judge Selna to violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment -- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion", with publicly funded schools being an arm of Congress -- because Selna found no secular purpose for the statement. How about education?

Selna continues that "Corbett could have criticized Peloza for teaching religious views in class without disparaging those views". Corbett's dispute was not only with the general fact of Peloza teaching his personal religous views to students but with the particular nonsense that Peloza was teaching. It is difficult to detail the many flaws of Creationism without disparaging it because it is so flawed as to be completely ungrounded in anything except tautological belief.

Peloza eventually went to court to try to overturn the school's demand that he teach evolution. That case is listed by the NCSE as one of ten major court cases about creationism and evolution. Peloza was propagandizing kids with religious, superstitious nonsense.

Of further interest, Farnan had listed several other of Corbett's statements that he also charged violated his Christian rights:

• saying that religion has been used to "get the peasants to oppose something that is in their best interests", in the case of proposed 18th-century land reforms.
• calling the Boy Scouts a "homophobic and racist organization", which is half right.
• saying that the Boy Scouts' becoming an exclusively Christian organization would require the government to stop giving them preferential free access to government facilities, which it would.
• noting that Sweden has a lower church attendance rate and a lower crime rate than the United States to suggest morality is independent of faith.
• saying that masturbation does not make you go blind
• saying that abstinence-only education does not prevent teenage pregnancy, which it does not.
• saying that conservatives "everywhere in the world [...] from conservative Christians in this country to Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan" seek to control women's reproduction.
• calling Rush Limbaugh "a fat pain-in-the-ass liar" which, to the exception that he has lost weight, he is.
• saying that inner city teens have fewer private places to use drugs.
• saying that marijuana is easier to students to acquire than alcohol.
• saying that Southern states with prison policies based on the "Biblical notion" of punishment rather than rehabilitation have higher crime rates.

Farnan thinks his rights are being violated by hearing things he does not want to hear, facts as well as arguments and opinions. This case reminds me of the current international attempts to outlaw "defamation of religion" with the specific grievance of the Mohammed cartoons. It is fortunate to note that on all of those other issues Farnan brought to court, Judge Selna disagreed that there was anything worth suing over.

Also interesting: On pages 9-10 of Selna's ruling, we see that Farnan falsified quotes by Corbett and submitted them as evidence of Corbett's anti-Christianity. Somebody had a recording of the day's session and found that Corbett was instead speaking highly of a Christian student.

I see Selna's ruling as a serious threat to free speech and education. If a teacher cannot oppose a popular religious viewpoint when the religious viewpoint is in dispute with the facts, it is an affront to the teacher's freedom of speech, it contributes to establishment of a state religion by making the religious viewpoint a protected class, and children will be denied an important part of their education. I hope that Corbett appeals and gets some bigger guns from the ACLU behind him so that Selna's ruling does not become a precedent that can be used to expand further the set of protected religious beliefs that teachers are not allowed to offend.

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Unrelated to the above topic, an update to an earlier post: Singaporean feminists have retaken control of the AWARE organization.