The Darwinist totalitarians are busily at work in California. A week or so ago we noted that the Left is never content to win the battle they say they want to win. Rather, each victory leads them to on to another fight to change the culture. So it is in Bakersfield where a school district took the oponents of Intelligent Design at their word when they said that ID is appropriate for a social studies or philosophy class but not a science class.
The administrators at Frazier Mountain High School decided to offer an elective philosophy course that would compare various theories of origins including, but not limited to, ID and naturalistic evolution.
Despite the fact that the course is a philosophy course and is an elective The Americans United for the Separation of Church and State have threatened the district with litigation if they don't yank it. See here for the story.
It should be becoming clear to average Americans that the fight against ID is not merely a battle to maintain the purity of science, as if such a thing existed, rather it is a battle to determine which metaphysical worldview is going to dominate our culture, including our schools: naturalistic materialism or some form of non-naturalism.
The naturalists are desperate that our young people not be informed that there are alternatives to naturalism, and thus ID must be kept out of our schools at all costs. Whether it is seen as a scientific or philosophical alternative or a sociological phenomenon doesn't matter. Students must not be allowed to think that there is any alternative to naturalism.
The day is not far off, we predict, when it will be seriously proposed that anyone with strong religious convictions be prohibited from teaching biology for fear that their convictions will spill over into his classroom instruction and taint his teaching. The day is even closer when any teacher with strong convictions will be prima facie disqualified from proposing an elective which examines naturalistic explanations of anything because the assumption will be that the teacher must have a religious motive for wanting to teach such a course.
Of course, no one should try to deny the truth of this because, for deeply devout persons, their religion colors and influences everything they do. Their whole life is informed by their devotion to God, so they have religious motives for everything they do. If they wish to teach a course that may touch upon the naturalism vs. non-naturalism controversy, then, it will be rightly argued, there must be at least a partial religious impetus behind their proposal, and therefore they must be refused.
Despite the fact that the premises of this argument are true, the conclusion would be grossly unjust for at least two reasons.
One is that similar restraints will not apply to the teacher who embraces naturalism. That teacher will be allowed to offer whatever course he/she wants because the presumption, as false as any presumption can be, is that naturalism is religiously neutral.
The second is that no one should be discriminated against on the basis of his or her religion. Teachers should be allowed to teach any course for which they are qualified and should be denied that opportunity only if they demonstrate that they can't be trusted not to flout the relevant laws regarding what can and cannot be taught in a public school.
Despite the injustice and unconstitutionality of such proposals, however, we're quite confident that they will be seriously advanced in the not too distant future.