It’s not very often when news media inserts itself in a contentious local issue, but the Cleveland Plain Dealer decided that the separation of church and state was a bridge too far. It took a side in a resolved issue over a public school musical performance of an opera with religious concepts.
A new Ohio law gave tax money to groups who mentored public school children, which is a good thing. However Gov. Kasich decided to force mentoring programs to partner with faith-based groups. Kasich believes, wrongly, that the public school should be where children get their religious education.
House Bill 483 was ‘legislation that makes appropriation changes and minor policy changes as part of the Mid-Biennial Review (MBR), a package of bills that strives to initiate reforms to state spending, agency operations, and state policies and programs.’ Tucked inside HB 483 was a new program called “Career Advising And Mentoring Program” that would grant tax payer money to groups who helped mentor public school children.
After being asked to add an Islamic holiday to its official calendar, a Maryland school board instead decided to remove all religious references from the calendar. Not only was it a slap to Muslims but is actually the best solution to the problem of religious privilege in public.
The long drawn out saga of John Freshwater, the Mount Vernon Ohio middle school teacher who was fired for injecting his religious beliefs into his science classes, is officially over after the US Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal from a 2013 Ohio Supreme Court ruling that upheld his termination. Now he can move to the Bible and Chicken Dinner circuit playing the ‘martyr’ he believes he had become.
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) reported on August 19th that Ohio Representatives Andy Thompson (R-95) and Matt Huffman (R-4) introduced House Bill 597 to repeal Ohio’s participation in the Common Core curriculum. Even with recent changes, it includes language that would allow creationism and climate change denial to be taught in the public schools.
If you spend enough time involved in the fight to maintain the separation of the church and state, you tend to see the same arguments from theists used over and over. Even though the arguments have been refuted over and over, they still use them and act like it is a way to get a checkmate against real religious freedom. One such argument is believing if only religion were put back into the schools all the problems in the world will disappear. The reality is much much different.
Something interesting I found on the Intertubes the other day gives a good example of an argument about putting religion back in the schools. It was a blog post about a book by Jeff Wallace titled “In God We Trusted”: