Texas creationist McLeroy spins the educational disaster he created
The Bad Astronomer (Phil Plait) digs into an editorial by none other than Don McLeroy:
[… You] just know that reading an op-ed from Don McLeroy — an evangelistic creationist who was (was, thank heavens) the head of the Texas State Board of Education — trying to defend and spin the BoE’s insertion of religion and far-right rhetoric into the state standards is going to be head-explodey.
And it is.
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So anyway, reading McLeroy’s apologetics in the op-ed is astounding. Before he even starts, the nonsense and spin begins; the headline is “McLeroy: The State Board of Education’s standards should make Texans proud”. Yeah.
OK, here’s a fun sample of what McLeroy says:
New science standards were adopted in March 2009. […] The controversy over science standards was actually the result of an attempted hijacking of science for ideological purposes by evolutionists. Their agenda was much more about worldviews than biology. The standards reflect real science and challenge students to study some of evolution’s most glaring weaknesses in explaining the fossil record and the complexity of the cell.
Actually, it really was about biology, and how the conservative Board members kept trying to distort scientific reality. It was McLeroy and his cohorts who inserted worldviews into the standards; his and the Board majority’s extremely narrow and religious view of the world. This is a standard creationist tactic: accuse others of doing what you’re doing. By the way, those “glaring weaknesses” are nothing of the sort; the Board uses weasel words and language to make it seem like evolution is a weak idea, when in fact it is the very basis and unifying concept in modern biology.
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Plait goes on to jibe McLeroy for the latter’s insistence on the non-existence of the exact phrase “separation of Church and State” in the Constitution.
McLeroy’s editorial (published on the last day of 2010) can be found here:
McLeroy: The State Board of Education’s standards should make Texans proud
After the paragraph quoted by Plait, McLeroy wrote this:
Board detractors still misrepresent the science standards. They should heed the warning of Richard Feynman, famed physicist, who in an important speech on scientific integrity stated “the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” Mission accomplished. Integrity restored.
Sorry Dr. McLeroy, but Feynman was not into substituting religion for science. That is just fraudulent on the part of McLeroy.
McLeroy then goes on to write:
New history standards were adopted in May 2010. They ensure that our children will learn what it means to be an American. Distinguished historian William B. Allen stated “the founding era and the founding fathers are not just a topic of instruction for us … they are the meat we feed upon … . Therefore, our task is not to ask whether we should regard the founders with tender care and understanding; our task is to find the means to do so.” And in Texas, we are finding the means to do so. The new standards require students to be taught the founding documents, American Exceptionalism, and the national mottos of “In God We Trust” and “E Pluribus Unum.”
There is a concise theocratic definition of what is meant by “American” - to recite “In God We Trust” and believe in American Exceptionalism. The former is just a motto that wasn’t too common until the fundamentalists in the 20th century felt afraid enough of changes to start requiring incantation of that phrase. And as for American Exceptionalism - at best it is a debatable topic as to whether any nation is any more exceptional than the next - each has its own uniqueness. What McLeroy no doubt means is the religious interpretation of that phrase.
McLeroy is frantic that his term in charge of the Texas SBOE not go down as an exercise in stupidity, so he is trying to redefine his legacy via an editorial. Too bad for him that even his own constituents decided that he was so unacceptable that they voted him out of office.