Daniel Dvorkin's Journal: Peace in our time.

This has garnered lots of comments along the lines of "Great, now schoolkids in TN can give answers based on Islam / Buddhism / Hinduism / FSMism and get full credit and there's nothing they can do about it! Be careful what you ask for, fundies! Hah hah hah!"

It does not work that way. Here's how it will work. Religious answers which will be acceptable, and more generally, religious challenges to school authority which will be acceptable, will be those based in Christianity, specifically fundamentalist Protestantism. And students who profess other beliefs will be even more ostracized than they already are. This is what the sponsors of the bill wish to achieve, and if the bill becomes law and survives the inevitable court challenges, it is what they will achieve. To think anything else is naivete of the highest and most dangerous order

Precedent says otherwise.

[ElectricTurtle]

Your dramatic rhetoric is a bit out of touch with reality. In North Carolina [about.com], which is equally Bible-belt territory, a school instituted a policy that allowed people to distribute religious texts at the school. And while a round of Bibles went out, it was soon followed by a round of plethora of Pagan/Wiccan literature that caused the school to toss out the policy.

The justice system in the US has quite clearly demonstrated time and time again that no public policy will be allowed to selectively exclude rel

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[PopeRatzo]

This is a quite different policy Daniel is talking about. It's not about proselytizing or distributing the public school equivalent of Chick tracts, it's about the inclusion of theological discourse as part of the educational process.

So, if the teacher asks the seventh grade class, "Why was the Civil War fought?" and a student answers, "Because God was angry with America for its fornicating ways," it will have to be accepted.

This is from the story in the Tennessee paper:

Under the bill, school districts als

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[ElectricTurtle]

It's not different, and you too speak of exclusion as though it will be allowed, all precedent to the contrary. The point remains that if Johnny can say 'because God...' and be right, Muhammad can say 'because Allah...' and be right. As soon as that happens and gets challenged, the policy will all get tossed out, either by the courts or a school administration's fear of the courts.

My challenge remains unmet, show me a precedent from recent decades that demonstrates that this is anything more than paranoi

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[PopeRatzo]

As soon as that happens and gets challenged, the policy will all get tossed out, either by the courts or a school administration's fear of the courts.

The more I think about it, the more I think you're probably right. As soon as someone steps up and answers a science question, "..because Allah" the whole thing will be tossed out.

Except that the communities where this law will be most applicable don't really cotton to muslims or pagans or pastafarians. These are mainly Christian communities, bible belt, and