Buzzfeed has a selection of jaw-dropping excerpts from a 5th grade science textbook currently in use in state-sponsored schools in Louisiana. Included are the birth of the world thousands of years ago, dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, the sham of carbon dating, and, as an added bonus, the constant and exclusive use of only male pronouns in reference to human reasoning, judgement, and knowledge:
Picture: Scott Kinmartin (CC)
Thanks to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindall’s extensive voucher program (which many other Republicans want to establish on state and national levels), state funds will go towards indoctrinating youth with religious programming in privatized education centers. Taxpayers will dish out an anti-science message in texts and teaching materials, all under the guise of helping the poor and middle-income students. And they’ll be learning some pretty ridiculous nonsense, served up as facts (and not faith).
Won’t somebody please think of the children!?
via Deanna Pan at Mother Jones:
Publicly funded bible-based high schools in Louisiana will teach biology students that dinosaurs were created six thousand years ago, and that one still lives in a lake in Scotland, the Scotsman is amazed to report:
Thousands of American school pupils are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real – in an attempt by religious teachers to disprove Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Pupils attending privately-run Christian schools in the southern state of Louisiana will learn from textbooks next year, which claim Scotland’s most famous mythological beast is a living creature. Thousands of children are to receive publicly-funded vouchers enabling them to attend the schools – which follow a strict fundamentalist curriculum.
One… textbook called Biology 1099 reads: “Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others.
Via Wikipedia and TruthAttack.org:
Tom Cryer was an attorney in Shreveport, Louisiana who was charged with and later acquitted of willful failure to file U.S. federal income tax returns in a timely fashion. In a recent case in United States Tax Court, Cryer contested a determination by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service that he owed $1.7 million in taxes and penalties. Before the case could come to trial, Cryer died June 4, 2012. He was 62:
And I thought the Rockfeller Drug Laws in New York State were terrible, this is crazy. Ramon Antonio Vargas reports in the Times-Picayune:
Cornell Hood II got off with probation after three marijuana convictions in New Orleans.
He didn’t fare too well after moving to St. Tammany Parish, however. A single such conviction on the north shore landed the 35-year-old in prison for the rest of his life.
State Judge Raymond S. Childress punished Hood under Louisiana’s repeat-offender law in his courtroom in Covington on Thursday. A jury on Feb. 15 found the defendant guilty of attempting to possess and distribute marijuana at his Slidell home, court records show.
Hood moved from eastern New Orleans to the Slidell area after he admitted to separate charges of distribution of marijuana and possession with intent to distribute marijuana on Dec. 18, 2009, in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court. He received a suspended five-year prison sentence and five years’ of probation for each — which was precisely the same penalty he got in that court after pleading guilty to possessing and intending to distribute marijuana on Feb.
Thou Shall Not Kill. Unless it’s Time for Worship. The Times-Picayune reports:
Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed into law one of the more controversial bills from the recent legislative session, one allowing guns to be carried into houses of worship.
Jindal’s office said Tuesday the governor acted on the bill in the past few days after receiving it June 20.
Including the “gun-in-church” bill, House Bill 1272 by Rep. Henry Burns, R-Haughton, Jindal has signed into law 940 of the 1,067 bills the Legislature sent him, vetoed 12, and used his pen to line-item spending measures in four different budget bills.
Burns’ bill would authorize persons who qualified to carry concealed weapons having passed the training and background checks to bring them to churches, mosques, synagogues or other houses of worship as part of a security force.
