Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal promoted and signed into law a stealth creationism bill that will allow the teaching of “intelligent design” in the science classrooms of Louisiana public schools, and now the fallout has begun.

One of America’s leading scientific organizations, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, has announced that they are boycotting the state of Louisiana.

As President of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), I am writing to inform you of a recent decision by our Executive Committee. We will not hold the Society’s 2011 annual meeting in New Orleans even though the city has been a popular venue for us in the past, and we received a reasonable site and organization package for the meeting. The Executive Committee voted to hold the 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City in large part because of legislation S8561, which you signed into law in June 2008. It is the firm opinion of SICS’s leadership that this law undermines the integrity of science and science education in Louisiana.

Barbara Forrest comments:

No doubt the creationists at the Discovery Institute and the LA Family Forum will try to make hay out of this boycott by blaming SICB. But it is not the SICB that has done the damage here; it is the legislature and the governor, egged on by the Discovery Institute and the LFF. The SICB held its 2004 meeting in New Orleans, and it was a huge event that contributed to the city’s tourism business.

The legislators and Gov. Jindal are the people who refused to consider the economic damage to the state that they were warned would result from their passing this bill. Other state agencies that have done stupid things like this, e.g., the Kansas Board of Education in 1999, when it stripped evolution out of the state science standards, were warned by their pro-science citizens that such decisions could damage their states’ economies. The public officials never seem to take such warnings seriously. We pro-science activists, scientists, and teachers who lobbied against the Louisiana bill last year — in other words, people who do real work for the state of Louisiana such as, say, educating students and searching for a cure for cancer — tried to warn public officials of repercussions like this. They ignored us.

The legislature and Gov. Jindal — and no one else — bear the responsibility. The scientific organizations, not to mention all the other organizations that have come to New Orleans, as well as to other Louisiana convention centers, to do business, deserve credit for wanting to help the city and our state. Indeed, they already have helped the city and the state as a whole many times in the past by coming here for their meetings. Any negative reactions against SICB about the fallout from their decision not to hold future meetings in Louisiana while this law is on the books should be turned around and properly directed toward the people who actually did the damage to Louisiana: the legislature, Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana Family Forum, and the Discovery Institute — not the SICB.