Last week, the Ohio House of Representatives passed HB 164, the “Ohio Student Religious Liberties Act of 2019. The purpose of the bill is to protect the rights of students to religious expressions without penalty in the public school classroom. Under this bill, a student cannot be given a punative grade for simply expressing their religious views as part of a class assignment.
The bill sounds sensible enough, given the many documented instances of students receiving poor grades on otherwise well written assignments merely because a teacher disagreed with the student’s religious views of the subject. A key part of the bill says that no school…
“shall prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student’s work.”
Naturally, the wording of the bill has many fretting that a student could state on a biology paper that the earth is only 6000 years old and the teacher would be prohibited from marking the grade down for that. However, that doesn’t seem to be a realistic scenario given that the bill mentions “legitimate pedagogical concerns.” If the assignment is for the student to correctly explain what the theory of evolution says regarding the development of a certain biological structure, then it doesn’t seem realistic to worry that this bill would protect a student who might write that theory of evolution is satanic and doesn’t explain anything.
Such a worry seems overwrought, but that doesn’t seem to stop opponents from naysaying it anyways. The bill’s sponsors say the “…bill is not an expansion but a clarification (of) what students can and cannot do in religious expression.” Regardless, the bill is now on its way to the Ohio Senate. If it passes there, it will be up to the Ohio Governor to sign it or veto it.
So the religion of evolution will still remain unchallenged in science classrooms?
Post from this morning:
Further notes on the fact that Darwinian evolution is more properly classified as a pseudoscience and/or a religion for atheists
Darwinian atheists, with their vital dependence on bad liberal theology, instead of any real time substantiating scientific evidence, in order to try to make their case for Darwinian evolution are, as Cornelius Van Til put it, like the child who must climb up onto his father’s lap into order to slap his face.
I don’t have a problem with this. Given the impact that it has had over the centuries I believe that religion should be part of the required curriculum.
This is good as long as students can ask the science teachers the hard questions that will prove some of the “science” lessons aren’t really science. And that is only good if said nonsense is then removed from science classes.
Won’t make any difference. Lawsuits on this subject are never started in state courts. They’re always in Federal district “courts”, which are completely unaffected by state laws.
Schools will continue to avoid endless unwinnable litigation. School boards don’t want to explain why they’re spending 100% of their budget on lawyers. It’s a strictly rational decision.
I live in Ohio so I have been involved in some of these debates in the past. For example, in the late 1990’s I had several of my letters to the editor published in a local newspaper defending the student led “see you at the pole” campaign, which was (and still is) a student led movement where students regularly or occasionally meet for prayer before school on school grounds at its flagpole. At the time I wrote my letters atheists were trying to suppress the practice as unconstitutional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_You_at_the_Pole
Hypocritical atheists, of course, believe in “free speech for me but not for thee.” The logical contradictions and double standard doesn’t bother them. People motivated intolerance and hate are never bothered by logic.