North Texas Nonconformist

As those of you who live in my home state may know, the Texas Board of Education has been under pressure from pro-Creationism members and from external organizations to water down the teaching of Evolution in the science curriculum in Texas. This attempt to completely subvert the integrity of science education in Texas has been going on for years, aided by an electorate that seems incapable of critical thinking when it comes to evaluating the merits of candidates for positions on the board (wake up people!).
This posting from Digby enumerates the extremely negligible qualifications of Don Patton, one of the opponents of the teaching of Evolution as part of the education process in Texas, who testified at recent board hearings on science teaching.
Based on my evaluation of his claimed qualifications, if he can call himself "Dr", then I ought to start claiming myself as a Professor. You see, unlike Mr. Patton, I actually have a degree in Geology, from the University of Manchester (1976).
Sadly, like many dangerous demagogues of the past, Patton does appear to be able to speak superficially plausible nonsense in a resonant, well-modulated voice. His opponents may lack in bombast, but as this posting from P.Z. Myers makes clear, opposition to his brand of unscientific religious nonsense spans most of the spectrum of academia, including (in this case) historians. The contempt of these people for the entire education process appears to know no limits.
In a related set of wackiness, the Insitute of Creation Research, whom Mr. Patton was representing in his appearance before the Texas board, has recently filed a complaint against the Texas Higher Education Co-Ordination Board in federal court for an injunction requiring the THECB to issue the Certificate of Authority and permit ICR to issue Master of Science degrees in science education. This follows the THECB rejection of their 2008 request to permit the ICR to offer a Master’s degree in science education in Texas.
This blog posting by a practising lawyer outlines the numerous ways in which this complaint is a waste of dead tree products and court system bandwidth.
The entire complaint seems to me to be another attempt to create publicity and engage in some martyrdom, with the education and the court systems ultimately being pointed to as the nasty villians.
This sort of devious, intellectually dishonest behaviour from supporters of Creationism is likely to continue until electors start to apply much more rigorous thinking and evaluation processes to education board candidates in Texas. Voting for candidates who, by a process of defective reasoning, seek to elevate the teaching of Creationism to the level of science may make people feel more virtuous (I guess), but if continued, the election of backward-looking, unthinking individuals to positions of power in the U.S. education system will undermine the system over time to the point where it ceases to have any credibility, either inside the U.S.A. or in the rest of the world. The obsession with Creationism is regarded in Europe was a weird, illogical and highly suspect behaviour pattern peculiar to the U.S.A. (Even the Roman Catholic Church, that most hierarchical and conservative of organizations, formally accepted Evolution as an explanation for the development of intelligent life on Earth years ago.)

...explaining why the Nuremburg Defense ("I was only obeying orders") was ruled irrelevant at the time, and why it is still irrelevant as a defense to charges of illegal activity by government and military employees.
The key part of the argument is contained in this neat summary:

...people who act on behalf of the government must be assured that unless they exercise some basic moral and legal common sense reasoning, then they will be held accountable for their actions and prosecuted for violating any laws — most especially obvious laws which any half-conscious adult should have noticed they were breaking.
Government employees and independent contractors are not automatons whom we simply wind up and aim in some desired direction; they are morally responsible adults who must be held morally and legally responsible for actions they choose to take. They have a choice to not take action they suspect may be legally questionable or which appear to be morally dubious. Granted, there are grey areas where it's not always obvious what is legal and what is illegal. I'd like to think that those engaged in actively administering criminal treatments like waterboarding would have noticed that they were breaking the law, but I could accept that not every situation was quite so clear. Is that a reason to withhold prosecution? Absolutely not.

While I was on vacation in the Bahamas, it seems that Rick Perry, our Governor, hinted that Texas could always secede from the Union if it did not like the political direction out of Washington. He apparently made the comments in Austin at one of several "tea parties".
Don't get me started on the irredeemable stupidity behind the tea party concept - the Boston Tea Party was a protest against taxation without representation, while America was a disenfranchised colony of Great Britain. The current "tea parties" are nothing more than publicity stunts by a bunch of pissed voters who have taxation with representation - just not the representation that they voted for. In short, this is nothing more than childish petulance from sore losers.
It seems that Perry has since been heard trying to walk back from his original comments...oops, sorry, I meant he has been clarifying his comments, but in the meantime, his comments have ignited a predictable storm of comment. Political luminaries such as Ron Paul (ho-hum) and Tom DeLay (somebody save us from this fuckwit) have weighed in with their own comments.
I first encountered some Texas secessionists in the UseNet days, when a discussion broke out in a UseNet group about whether Texas could secede. I got myself into a vigorous, but ultimately frustrating debate with one of them, when I pointed out that the U.S. Constitution has no defined process for secession, for Texas or for any other state. It does not forbid secession, but there is no process defined anywhere for how a state can secede. The secessionist that I was arguing with waved aside this issue with a bland "it does not prohibit secession so we can secede if we want to", but totally failed to answer the obvious question "how would you do this?". He also seemed to be unwilling to address any of the practical issues of secession, such as what pro-rated percentage of the US National Debt should be assumed by Texas when it secedes. This, by the way, was one of the issues that choked off the last serious attempt by Quebec to secede from Canada in the mid-1990's, when the then-PM Brian Mulroney told the Parti Quebecois that Quebec would have to assume a pro-rata share of the Canadian national debt if it succeeded. If you want to leave the club, you have to settle your bar bills...if the other states decide to apportion the debt amount on the basis of land area, then Texas is bankrupt from day 1.
The practical reality is that Texas is not seceding from the Union any time soon, and any public figure who suggests that it is even a possibility is engaging in empty bloviation of the most facile kind, bordering on stupid.

...which tries to explain the phenomenon that simplistic, sometimes idiotic arguments made by people with limited knowledge of a subject can overwhelm more complete arguments that require both detail knowledge and time for explanation. This is what I have referred to as "the curse of the soundbite", where a glib, often stupid 30 second summary of a complex issue ends up substituting for any substantive summary of the issue.

In World Magazine online, Cal Thomas has a commentary on the Iowa Supreme Court decision. Included among the standard worried hand-waving along the lines of "if they eliminate man-woman marriages, what are the new rules?" (has nobody in the Christian sphere ever understood the concept of informed consent?) is this gem:

To those on the political and religious right who are intent on continuing the battle to preserve “traditional marriage” in a nation that is rapidly discarding its traditions, I would ask this question: What poses a greater threat to our remaining moral underpinnings? Is it two homosexuals living together, or is it the number of heterosexuals who are divorcing and the increasing number of children born to unmarried women, now at nearly 40 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?

Ding! We have a Winner! As numerous commentators have pointed out in the past, the real threat (in numerical terms) to marriage is not single-sex couples getting married, it is heterosexual couples divorcing. Anybody who does not realize this is either arguing from a position of bigotry or does not understand simple math (or both).
And Thomas then hits the nail on the head again in the next paragraph:

Most of those who are disturbed about same-sex marriage are not as exercised about preserving heterosexual marriage. That’s because it doesn’t raise money and won’t get them on TV. Some preachers would rather demonize gays than oppose heterosexuals who violate their vows by divorcing, often causing harm to their children. That’s because so many in their congregations have been divorced and preaching against divorce might cause some to leave and take their contributions with them.

Another home run! Even a cursory view of Judeo-Christian religious activity here in Dallas would confirm that it relies heavily on money (and plenty of it). You don't get to erect the sort of massive churches all over the place that are visible on even a short drive, without large piles of money. Especially when a lot of the money seems to be used to maintain elaborate corporate operations and lavish lifestyles and spending by church leaders...
Churches are big business here, they need lots of money to keep going, and therefore rely heavily on donations from wealthy church-goers. It is very cost-effective to rail from the pulpit about "heathen homosexuals" perverting the institution of marriage - there are unlikely to be any gay donors in the audience to offend, and the threat of "the gays" might actually increase donations. OTOH, reminding those in attendance of their solemn duty to remain married to their (presumably heterosexual) spouses risks offending those in attendance who just traded their last spouse in for the latest model...