The Climate Change “Debate” Is Over - Except for Religious Extremists and the GOP

An earlier post today noted that religion and Christianity in particular has been a long time  impediment to the acceptance of scientific knowledge - e.g., the Catholic Church's treatment of Galileo  and the Christian fundamentalists continue to deny the validity of evolution.     But nowhere does religious based ignorance pose a greater threat than in the context of global warming.  Because the Republican Party has become controlled by reality denying Christofascists, it is impossible to get any meaningful legislation passed by Congress that would address the growing problem of a warming earth, rising sea levels and changing climate patterns.  And when challenged the Christofascists and their political whores in the GOP bleat that there is no consensus on the role mankind is playing in the developing catastrophe.  Like so much of what comes out of the GOP and ignorance worshiping Christofascists, this claim is a lie.  A new Study that reviewed 20 years of peer reviewed research shows there is a clear consensus: Global warming is real and humans are playing a role in global warming:

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.

The public perception of a scientific consensus on AGW is a necessary element in public support for climate policy (Ding et al 2011). However, there is a significant gap between public perception and reality, with 57% of the US public either disagreeing or unaware that scientists overwhelmingly agree that the earth is warming due to human activity (Pew 2012).

Contributing to this 'consensus gap' are campaigns designed to confuse the public about the level of agreement among climate scientists.

Andrew Sullivan notes the consequences for American politics:

An international team of scientists analyzed the abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed papers published between 1991 and 2011 dealing with climate change and global warming. That’s right — we’re talking about 20 years of papers, many published long before Superstorm Sandy, last year’s epic Greenland melt, or Australia’s “angry summer.”

But the main reason many Americans still refuse to believe it is religious fundamentalism. That is immune to science and reason. But it is the bedrock belief of one of our political parties. 

Gays, of course are only too familiar with the Christofascist rejection of modern knowledge: despite consensus among every legitimate medical and mental health association in the country that sexual orientation is fixed and unchangeable, the Christofascists insist that being gay is a "choice" and that one can "change."

Despite all of this evidence of their know embrace of ignorance - not to mention hate and bigotry - I find it mind numbing that far too many people and media outlets give these people undeserved deference and respect.  They deserve no respect and certainly no deference whatsoever.

GOP Congressman Introduces Bill To Require Political Approval Of Scientific Papers

Nothing threatens the house of cards world view of the Christofascist - and by extension, the policy positions of the Republican Party - than modern scientific knowledge which shows that much of the Bible's supposed inerrant historical and doctrinal positions are untrue.  The human genome project that has confirmed that Adam and Eve were not historical figures is perhaps but one of the many scientific break through that have sent the fundamentalist crowd into conniptions and spells of the vapors.  So what does one do if one is a fundamentalist Christian or one of their political whores in the GOP?   You try to block new scientific research which may further discredit the veracity of supposedly Christian sacred texts.  Rushing in to do just that is GOP Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas (pictured at right) who has introduced a bill that would require that any research done using federal funds (which constitutes the majority of research done in the United States) must have its results and finding approved by the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the House of Representatives.  Given the far right GOP's stranglehold on the House of Representatives, this means that scientific research would come to a halt.  Thus we see the GOP's further embrace of ignorance in the quest to pander to the sensibilities of the most lunatic elements of the GOP base.  Here are some highlights on this idiocy:

Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas really does not understand science. Not scientific method, not scientific theories or laws, none of it. Which is why he submitted a bill draft titled the “High Quality Research Act” which would in effect add a politician into scientific studies.

The bill says that any research done using federal funds (which is the majority of research done in the United States) must have its results and finding approved by the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the House of Representatives. If the findings are not agreed to, the research is taken from the researchers and disposed of by Congress as it sees fit.


Congressman Smith has already landed himself in scientific hot water over his April 25th Letter to the National Science Foundation where he demanded that the NSF conduct an investigation into five research programs which contradict policies his donors want passed. This is what was expected when the noted anti-science Texan was appointed to the Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Congressman Lamar Smith is a leading example as to the disconnect within the Republican Party and reality. His “improvement” would compromise scientific research, and dismantle what little America has left for integrity. Despite how many other industries have fallen apart across the United States, we as a nation remain the gold standard of scientific research. It appears Lamar Smith will not rest until that too joins our other areas of once excellence, and we surrender to our national collapse.

To be a Republican nowadays, one must be either (i) a far right religious nutcase, (ii) clinically insane, (iii) motivated first and foremost by greed, or (iv) have had a lobotomy.   My many Republican ancestors must be spinning in their graves if they can see what the once respectable and rational GOP has become.

Nature’s Case for Same-Sex Marriage

One of the constant cries of the Christofascists is that gay sex and same sex romantic love are "unnatural" and against "natural law."  David George Haskell, a professor of biology at Sewanee, The University of the South, has an op-ed in the New York Times that debunks this myth used incessantly by the Bible beaters who prefer to cling to the writings of uneducated nomads rather than face the facts shown by science and modern knowledge.  The truth is that homosexuality and bi-sexuality are found all across nature.  It is only in man-made "natural law" first concocted in the Christian realm in the 13th century that homosexuality isn't normal.  Here are op-ed excerpts:

BIOLOGY has returned to the nation’s highest court. It’s not Darwin’s theory of evolution on the docket this time, but the nature of sex. Defenders of Proposition 8, California’s ban on gay marriage, base their case on what they call the “objective biological fact” that procreation is an exclusively heterosexual process. Citing the 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone, they argue that marriage should be “founded in nature.”

References to biology coat these arguments with a gloss of scientific rigor. But before we write nature into law, let’s take a stroll outside the Supreme Court’s chambers and check those biological facts.

If these birds and bees were the first to teach us about sex, we’ve forgotten part of the lesson. Just as some species that are mostly hermaphroditic contain unisexual individuals, some insects and vertebrates cannot be simply called male or female. Human biology joins in this rejection of binary claims of male and female. 

Of course, sexuality is more than an arrangement of cells. Bonds form between sexual partners that help define the social structure of each species. What does nature on the Mall teach us about these relationships? Look, for instance, at the mallards paddling in the nearby reflecting pools. If they are like mallards elsewhere, then one in 10 of them engage in homosexual sex. 

Stepping from the northern border of the Mall into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, we come face-to-taxidermied-face with our great ape relatives. Before these apes were sequestered in museum cabinets, homosexual bonds were a natural part of their lives. This is especially true for our closest living cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees. 

The facts of biology plainly falsify the oft-repeated notion that homosexuality is unnatural. Every species has evolved its own sexual ecology, and so nature resists generalizations. Does humanity’s natural inheritance include homosexual bonds and behaviors? Certainly. This conclusion is reinforced by the growing evidence that our sexual orientation is influenced by both our genes and the environment that we experience in the womb. 

A wide, living rainbow arcs across the natural world. Diversity rules in sexuality, just as it does in the rest of biology. This natural variety does not provide ready-made moral guidance. But to claim that the only natural forms of sex and pair bonding occur between unambiguous males and females is to ignore the facts of human biology. Let those who wish for marriage to be “founded in nature” take note: the view outside the Supreme Court is full of life’s beautiful sexual variegation.

Haskell gives many other examples of bi-sexuality and homosexuality in the op-ed, but you get the point.  Like so much else that the Christofascists and their political whores in the GOP claim, the claim that homosexuality is "unnatural" is a lie. 

Why Science and Religion Cannot Be Reconciled

As scientific knowledge advances it is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile religion - especially fundamentalist forms of religion and those that claim the Bible (or Koran) are inerrant - with scientific reality.   The Old Testament including the Book of Genesis simply do not agree with and cannot be reconciled with the true age of the Earth, evolution, modern knowledge on sexual orientation, or the findings of the human genome project that confirm that Adam and Eve never existed as historical persons.   And the problem is only going to grow worse for fundamentalists in particular.  The result?  More of the younger generations walking away from religion white the hysteria and venom of the fundamentalists - both Christian and Muslim - grow more extreme as they desperately fight against modernity and anything that threatens their house of cards faith systems.  A piece in Huffington Post by Physicist, Victor Stenger, looks at why religion and science cannot be reconciled in the final analysis.  The piece is very harsh towards religion, and in my view deservedly so.  Especially, when one considers the self-congratulatory embrace of ignorance among the Christofascists.  Here are some article excerpts (they are fairly lengthy):

Religious apologists, spiritualist gurus, and accommodating atheists have been bombarding us with assertions that science and religion have no reason not to get along. This may be politically convenient, but it's simply untrue. Science and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable, and they always will be.

Faith is belief in the absence of supportive evidence and even in the light of contrary evidence. No one disputes that religion is based on faith. Some authors claim that science is also based on faith. They argue that science takes it on faith that the world is rational and that nature can be ordered in an intelligible way.

However, science makes no such assumption on faith. It analyzes observations by applying certain methodological rules and formulates models to describe those observations. It justifies that process by its practical success, not by any logical deduction derived from dubious metaphysical assumptions. We must distinguish faith from trust. Science has earned our trust by its proven success. Religion has destroyed our trust by its repeated failure.

Using the empirical method, science has eliminated smallpox, flown men to the moon, and discovered DNA. If science did not work, we wouldn't do it. Relying on faith, religion has brought us inquisitions, holy wars, and intolerance. Religion does not work, but we still do it.

Science and religion are fundamentally incompatible because of their unequivocally opposed epistemologies -- the separate assumptions they make concerning what we can know about the world. Every human alive is aware of a world that seems to exist outside the body, the world of sensory experience we call the natural. Science is the systematic study of the observations made of the natural world with our senses and scientific instruments.

By contrast, all major religions teach that humans possess an additional "inner" sense that allows us to access a realm lying beyond the visible world -- a divine, transcendent reality we call the supernatural. If it does not involve the transcendent, it is not religion.

No doubt science has its limits. However, that fact that science is limited doesn't mean that religion or any alternative system of thought can or does provide insight into what lies beyond those limits. For example, science cannot yet show precisely how the universe and life originated naturally, although many plausible scenarios exist. But the fact that science does not at present have a definitive answer to this question does not mean that ancient creation myths such as those in Genesis have any substance, any chance of eventually being verified.

So far we see no evidence that the feelings people experience when they perceive themselves to be in touch with the supernatural correspond to anything outside their heads, and have no reason to rely on those feelings when they occur. 

[R]eligion, as it is currently practiced, with its continued focus on closed thinking and ancient mythology, is not doing much to support the goal of a better, safer world. In fact, religion is hindering our attempts to attain that goal. Today science and religion find themselves in serious conflict. Even moderate believers do not fully accept Darwinian evolution. Although they claim to see no conflict between their faith and evolution, they insist that God still controlled the development of life so humans would evolve, which is not at all what the theory of evolution says.

Those who rely on observation and reason to provide an understanding of the world must stop viewing as harmless those who rely instead on superstition and the mythologies in ancient texts passed down from the childhood of our species. For the sake of the future of humanity, we must fight to expunge the fantasies of faith from human thinking.

Religious faith would not be such a negative force in society if it were just about religion. However, the magical thinking that becomes deeply ingrained whenever faith rules over facts warps all areas of life. It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with deep passion but without the slightest attention paid to the evidence that bears on the concept. Nowhere is this more evident than in America today where the large majority of the public hold on to a whole set of beliefs despite the total lack of evidence to support these beliefs and, indeed, strong evidence that denies them. Magical thinking and blind faith are the worst mental system we can apply under these circumstances. They allow the most outrageous lies to be accepted as facts.

From its very beginning, religion has been a tool used by those in power to retain that power and keep the masses in line. This continues today as religious groups are manipulated to work against believers' own best interests in health and economic well-being in order to cast doubt on well-established scientific findings. This would not be possible except for the diametrically opposed world-views of science and religion. Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion will change its commitment to nonsense.

Rabbinical Council of America Withdraws Support for Reparative Therapy

In related news to the immediately prior post, the Rabbinical Council of America announced last week that it would no longer support the referral of individuals for reparative therapy in general and to JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality) in particular.  As readers may recall, JONAH was founded by and is operated by Arthur Goldberg, a former felon who served time in prison for a massive securities fraud involving municipal bonds.  In my view, Goldberg switch from defrauding investors to defrauding tortured gays and their wing nut parents.  Here are excerpts from the Council's press release:

November 29, 2012

Dear Chaverim,

The following will be released to the press later today.

Rabbinical Council of America's Statement Regarding JONAH (Jews Offering New

Alternatives to Homosexuality)

In the years since the Rabbinical Council of America's first comment about JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality), "the only Jewish based organization dedicated to assisting individuals with unwanted same sex attractions move from gay to straight" in January, 2004, in which we suggested that rabbis might refer congregants to them for reparative therapy, many concerns about JONAH and reparative therapy have been raised.

As rabbis trained in Jewish law and values, we base our religious positions regarding medical matters on the best research and advice of experts and scholars in those areas, along with concern for the religious, emotional, and physical welfare of those impacted by our decisions. Our responsibility is to apply halakhic (Jewish legal) values to those opinions.

Based on consultation with a wide range of mental health experts and therapists who informed us of the lack of scientifically rigorous studies that support the effectiveness of therapies to change sexual orientation, a review of literature written by experts and major medical and mental health organizations, and based upon reports of the negative and, at times, deleterious consequences to clients of some of the interventions endorsed by JONAH, the Rabbinical Council of America decided in 2011, as part of an overall statement on the Jewish attitude towards homosexuality, to withdraw its original letter referencing JONAH. Despite numerous attempts by the RCA to have mention of that original letter removed from the JONAH website, our calls, letters, and emails remain unanswered. As Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, president of the RCA, stated in 2011, "We want it taken down. JONAH said it was a letter of support, but if you read the letter it is not. They took an informational statement and reprinted it, and the use of that as an endorsement is an error."

We believe that properly trained mental health professionals who abide by the values and ethics of their professions can and do make a difference in the lives of their patients and clients. The RCA believes that responsible therapists, in partnership with amenable clients, should be able to work on whatever issues those clients voluntarily bring to their session. Allegations made against JONAH lead us to question whether JONAH meets those standards.

I find it interesting that the Council stated that "we base our religious positions regarding medical matters on the best research and advice of experts and scholars in those areas" - what a difference from the Christian Taliban in America which rejects anything and everything that challenges their ignorance embracing house of cards religious belief system.

No Adam, No Eve, No Gospel - Wingnuts Continue to Freak Out

I've noted before the semi-hysteria that is going on largely behind the scenes and outside the view of the mainstream media among the Christianists and far right Christians over the growing scientific evidence that Adam and Eve of the Bible did not exist. As Bob Felton notes in response to the latest lunacy of Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention, the stakes are extremely high:

It’s bad for business, of course. No Adam and Eve means no Fall, which means no Original Sin, which means Jesus doesn’t save us from the horrible fact that we’re living human beings, i.e., cesspools of foulness, et cetera, et cetera; he merely gives ethical advice. Oh … and Holy Men like Albert Mohler don’t have special cosmic insights after all. You can see the problem.

Bob's right, the non-existence of Adam and Eve is VERY, VERY bad for business for institutional Christianity and those who make a living peddling the Christian story. Indeed, the whole story line collapses. And church finances with it. Frankly, I DO find amusement and entertainment it the matter. The anti-gay forces in the last resort only have the Bible as a justification for their anti-gay animus. Obviously, if Genesis is false, then what else in the Bible is false. Perhaps Leviticus, the principal font of anti-gay bigotry/justification? A piece in Christianity Today illustrates some of the varying efforts to dance around this potentially very fatal problem. Here are some highlights:

Now we come to another great moment of tension between Christian readings of Scripture and science. This issue's cover story, "The Search for the Historical Adam," reports the claims of recent genetic research that the human race did not emerge from pre-human animals as a single pair, as an "Adam" and an "Eve." The complexity of the human genome, we are told, requires an original population of around 10,000.

Christians have already drawn the line: there must be an original pair of humans endowed with souls—that is, the spiritual capacity to relate to God in the special way Genesis describes.

What is at stake? First, the entire story of what is wrong with the world hinges on the disobedient exercise of the will by the first humans. The problem with the human race is not its dearth of insight but its misshapen will.

Second, the entire story of salvation hinges on the obedience of the Second Adam. The apostle Paul, the earliest Christian writer to interpret Jesus' work, called Adam "a type of the one who was to come" (Rom. 5:14, ESV), and wrote that "[j]ust as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [Jesus]" (1 Cor. 15:49, ESV). He elaborated an "Adam Christology" that described a fallen humanity, headed by Adam, and a new, redeemed humanity with Christ as its head.

This understanding, that Christ's obedience undoes Adam's disobedience, is not some late development, but is integrated with the earliest interpretations of what God did and is doing in Christ. This conceptual framework is almost impossible without a first human couple.

[S]ome have suggested—as does John Collins in Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? (Crossway, 2011)—that if both biblical and scientific clues suggest a larger population contemporary with Adam and Eve (Whom did Cain marry? Whom did God protect him from?), we can still conceive of Adam and Eve as leaders of that original population. That suggestion has the virtue of embracing both a prehistoric couple and a prehistoric population.

At this juncture, we counsel patience. We don't need another fundamentalist reaction against science. We need instead a positive interdisciplinary engagement that recognizes the good will of all involved and that creative thinking takes time. In the long run, it may be the humility of our scholars as much as their technical expertise that will bring us to deeper knowledge of the truth.

The reality is that the adherents of Biblical literalism are facing a crisis of enormous proportions. Their whole ball of wax may be about to melt absent some way to use smoke and mirrors to dodge facing the reality that a great deal of the Old Testament simply is either not true at all or has been grossly re-written to meet the needs of revisers over the centuries. I believe that those who believe in rationalism and logic keep up the pressure on far right Christians who may be about to be undone by their own decision to embrace ignorance and reject objective fact and scientific knowledge.

Virginia's Lysenko - Cuccinelli's Dangerous Suit Against Climate Change

Both Slate and Blue Virginia have pieces that look at the danger that Ken Kookinelli's lawsuit and other actions against science pose for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and not just in terms of wasting money. The Blue Virginia piece calls the "Cooch" Virginia's Lysenko. For those not up on their Soviet history, Lysenko (pictured below) was Josef Stalin's puppet who manipulated alleged science to fit Stalin's insane views on the Soviet system's "New Man" and other areas where Stalin demanded that science be made to fit his megalomaniac agenda. In my personal opinion, Kookinelli is mentally disturbed (not to mention a possible closet case) and will try to force as many people as possible to embrace his untethered views. Nothing upsets the unhinged more than having objective reality and scientific truths challenge their fragile mental construct of an artificial reality. First, some highlights from Slate:

[W]hen Cuccinelli tried to put Virtus [on the Virginia great seal] in a burqa this week, the darling of the Tea Party movement explained without irony: "Just because we've always done something a certain way doesn't mean we always have to continue doing it that way." Seriously?
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The problem with Breastgate was that it distracted from Cuccinelli's other efforts to press the legal machinery of the commonwealth into the service of his own agenda. Between his thwarted attempts to rescind anti-discrimination policies for gays and lesbians at Virginia universities, his one-man lawsuit against Obamacare, his recent approval of a new state policy allowing sectarian prayer by state police chaplains at public events, and his lawsuit suit against the EPA for attempting to regulate greenhouse gases, Ken Cuccinelli has become the Where's Waldo of Fox News stories. But his latest attack—against the University of Virginia's climate science researchers—is more troubling than his assault on bare-breasted Romans.
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As Courtney Stuart first reported last week in Charlottesville's The Hook, Cuccinelli's office quietly filed a civil investigative demand (or CID, which is basically a subpoena) with the University of Virginia on April 23, giving the school 30 days to produce more than 10 years' worth of documents related to the state-funded research of a former faculty member, Michael Mann. . . . And who is this nefarious Michael Mann? A climate scientist who worked at UVA from 1999 to 2005 and now runs Penn State's Earth System Science Center. He became the climate-change deniers' whipping boy because of a 1999 paper he co-authored showing a dramatic uptick in surface temperatures after 1900.
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But it's not just Mann on the hook here. "With a weapon like this in Cuccinelli's hands, any faculty member at a public university in Virginia has got to be thinking twice about doing politically controversial research or communicating with other scholars about it," says Rachel Levinson, senior counsel with the American Association of University Professors. UVA environmental science professor Howard Epstein, a former colleague of Mann's, puts it this way: "Who is going to want to be on our faculty when they realize Virginia is the state where the A.G. investigates climate scientists?" If researchers are really afraid to do cutting-edge research in Virginia, the state's flagship university is in enormous trouble.
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It is the Blue Virginia piece that goes on to draw parallels between what Kookinelli is doing and the sinister "science" promoted by Josef Stalin through Lysenko. Neither Virginia nor the nation can afford to have scientific research curtailed or manipulated to fit the needs of religious extremists and flat earth types. The Bush/Cheney years illustrate all too well the damage that results. Cuccinelli is a menace and needs to be stop. Here are highlights from Blue Virginia:
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Eighty years ago, Josef Stalin found a scientist he liked. This was bad news for the scientists who were not so popular with the Soviet leadership. . . . Lysenko's theories would have been laughed out of the lab had he not found a sponsor willing and able to apply the full coercive power of government to reward those who supported Lysenko and punish those who disagreed. Thousands of scientists suffered under Lysenko, losing their jobs and often being imprisoned.
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It takes enormous courage to "speak truth to power" when you have a tyrannically-minded leader using power to threaten the truth. Which brings me to Ken Cuccinelli.
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The state has an important role in science: to fund research and education, to use and promote science, to ensure it is freely conducted. It is not the role of the state to dictate, for political reasons, which scientific theories may be considered right or wrong.
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When governments do take such a stance, and get away with it, it is a sign of a deep sickness in the body politic. Nothing is more important to democracy than the free and open pursuit of the truth. Politicians who don't respect or protect that pursuit represent the greatest danger a democracy can have. Because when you take away the ability of citizens to appeal to reason, truth and common sense, you open the door to arbitrary rule - which means that those in power can ultimately get away with anything.
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Some may see it as a small thing that Attorney General Cuccinelli is demanding information from the University of Virginia about the work of climate scientist Michael Mann to determine if he was "defrauding" state taxpayers - that is, by publishing peer-reviewed scientific research that Mr. Cuccinelli and his donors in the fossil fuel industry (such as Massey Energy) found inconvenient.
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This is no small thing. It is one of the most shocking acts I have witnessed in over three decades of studying, observing and participating in politics and government. Cuccinelli is crossing a line that democratic governments only cross at their peril. This action cannot stand - it must not stand.
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The key to maintaining democracy is that when governments overreach, the people slap their hand. It's time for us to stand up and do so again - all hands on deck, people! This is serious.

University Can Reject High School Christian Courses

A federal court ruling in California has struck a blow for scientific knowledge and rational thought by finding that the University of California does NOT have to accept high school course credits for courses taught at Christian schools. No doubt, the Christianists will cry that they are being victimized and subjected to religious discrimination. Of course, the claims will be false (like most else this folks peddle) and the schools will remain free to teach whatever fairy tales they want. Just don't expect legitimate institutions of higher education to recognize religious indoctrination as substantive course work. If parents want to squander their money and send their children to the Christianist equivalent of a madrasas, that's their option (and their stupidity). But just maybe, some of them will wake up to reality and strive to get their children educated as opposed to indoctrinated. Here are some highlights from the Pew Forum:

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The University of California has the right to reject courses taught at Christian high schools, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday (Jan. 12). Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, Calif., and the Association of Christian Schools International claimed the university's review policy was unconstitutional because it refused to certify courses that taught creationism and other beliefs.
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"The district court correctly determined that UC's rejections of the Calvary courses were reasonable and did not constitute viewpoint discrimination," the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled. Students from private schools must meet certain high-school requirements before they are eligible to apply to an undergraduate campus of the University of California.
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The court ruled that evidence in the case failed to show that the university was discriminating on the basis of religion. "UC's policy and its individual course decisions are not based on religion, but on whether a high school course is college preparatory," the three-judge panel ruled.
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In my personal view, subjecting children to religious based propaganda and indoctrination which has no basis in object reality and which is directly contrary to legitimate scientific knowledge borders on a form of child abuse.

Confirmed: God is Slightly Gay

Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle does some great columns that mock the idiocy of mindless bigots and political reactionaries. He now has a column that looks at the prevalence of same sex behavior across the animal kingdom and in the process takes homophobes to task. And, as is his usual approach, Morford demonstrates why Christianists' claims against homosexuality fall apart based on realities in nature. It's a fun column, but it exposes the closed minded shrillness of the foes of LGBT equality. No doubt James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Peter LaBarbera and similar gay-haters will find it less than amusing. Sometimes the real truth hurts. Here are some highlights:

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Confirmed: God is slightly gay Just ask the animals. As soon as they stop having all that homosexual sex. I am sitting here right now smiling just a little, fondly recalling that famously controversial children's book, the one about the gay penguins. Remember? That positively adorable pair of them, at the Central Park Zoo, who had adopted an abandoned egg and then hatched it themselves and were raising the chick together as a couple, even though the chick was clearly not theirs, . . .

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[T]he penguins in question, named Roy and Silo, were both males. This meant they were clearly in some sort of ungodly, aberrant homosexual relationship, mocking natural laws and defying God's will that all creatures only cohabitate with the opposite sex and buy microfiber sofas from Pottery Barn and eat their meals in silent resentment and never have sex.

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I am right now amused at this because it turns out Roy and Silo were not really so much of an anomaly at all. Nor were they some sort of unholy freakshow, an immoral mistake in the eyes of a wrathful hetero God. Far from it. Turns out they were, in fact, far more the norm than many humans, even to this day, want to let on.

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Behold, the ongoing, increasingly startling research: homosexual and bisexual behavior, it turns out, is rampant in the animal kingdom. And by rampant, I mean proving to be damn near universal, commonplace across all species everywhere, existing for myriad reasons ranging from pure survival and procreative influence, right on over to pure pleasure, . . . Imagine.

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New research is revealing so many creatures and species that exhibit homosexual/bisexual behavior of some kind, scientists are now saying there are actually very few, if any, species in existence that don't exhibit it in some way. It's everywhere: Bison. Giraffes. Ducks. Hyenas. Lions and lambs, lizards and dragonflies, polecats and elephants. Hetero sex. Anal sex. Partner swapping. The works.

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Here's the shocking new truism: In the wilds of nature, to not have some level of homosexual/bisexual behavior in a given species is turning out to be the exception, not the rule. Would you like to read that statement again? Aloud? Through a megaphone? To the Mormon and Catholic churches? And the rest of them, as well? Repeatedly?

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And so we extend the idea just a little bit. Because if homosexual/bisexual behavior is universal and by design, if gender mutability is actually deeply woven into the very fabric of nature itself, and if you understand that nature is merely another word for God, well, you can only surmise that God is, to put it mildly, much more than just a little bit gay.

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This, then, is what science appears to be trying to tell us, has been telling us, over and over again: Nature abides no narrow, simplistic interpretation of its ways. Nature will defy your childish fears and laughable behavioral laws at nearly every turn. God does not do shrill homophobia.

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And either humankind is part of nature and the wanton animal kingdom, a full participant in the messy inexplicable glories of the flesh and spirit and gender play, or we are the aberrant mistake, the ones who are lagging far behind the rest of the kingdom, sad and lost in the eyes of a very, very fluid and increasingly disappointed God.
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Ultimately, science will show the untruths of Christian fundamentalist and extreme Catholic dogma. These denominations can either accept modern knowledge or else help guaranty their own eventual extinction.