Overreacting to creationism in Ohio

So yet again creationism is flaring up, this time in a small Ohio town.  Right now it looks like a lot of he said-she said.   Did the teacher actually burn a cross on the student’s arm, or was it just an experiment gone wrong?  Did he refuse to remove a Bible from his desk? Is there anything wrong about having a Bible on your desk?  And most importantly, was he actually teaching creationism?

I tend to have mixed feelings about this perpetual conflict.   I don’t think creationism should be in science classrooms…but I also think that people often overreact to the controversy.  This teacher appears to have an exemplary record over 20-odd years–including a couple teaching awards.  His transgressions are much milder than passing out from drinking too much in the middle of class, or some other horror stories we hear about.   Surely we can solve this situation without suing someone.  I suspect that it’s pretty hard to get top-quality science teachers in central Ohio.  Is it really necessary to react so harshly for someone for disagrees with what is no more than 3 weeks of a typical high school biology class?  Maybe it would be easier to find a substitute for those weeks.

Granted there are probably logistical, legal and regulatory impediments to this type of solution.  But even if they could be overcome, I bet most most people would oppose this solution.  There’s something about this issue that gets everyone’s blood to boil.   We’re not even interested in working out what are, in my view, pretty minor disagreements.  Everyone has some primal desire to crucify the other side.


  1. “Is it really necessary to react so harshly for someone for disagrees with what is no more than 3 weeks of a typical high school biology class?”

    A biology teacher who can’t understand the most important concept of biology, deserves to be fired immediately. All the evidence shows that this teacher is an uneducated moron, who entertains himself by assaulting his students and teaching them bullshit.

    What’s really disgraceful is why did it take so long to fire this idiot.

    Where did you get the idea that evolution takes up only 3 weeks of a biology class? Any competent biology teacher would make evolution a major part of every single lesson every single day of the class. It’s impossible to properly teach biology any other way.

    Of course competent biology teachers are rare, especially in god-soaked America. Even worse are the many biology teachers who are too cowardly to stand up to the Christian thugs who threaten them if they even mention evolution. Christians are terrified of evolution and that’s why they want to destroy America’s science education. They should not be allowed to get away with it.

    Any rational person would not try to defend a teacher who is so obviously an incompetent stupid asshole, so I’m betting you’re a god-soaked uneducated moron who denies the established truth of evolution because it threatens the magic fairy who hides in the clouds.

    darwin-killed-god dot blogspot dot com

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