Let's Vote on the Sex of the Cat

I think I've used that analogy before, but I'm not positive and don't want to type "murphspot cat sex" into a search engine. It's meant as an analogy for the objectivity of reality. Let's say you and six of your closest friends are sitting around in a room. There is no form of entertainment in the room, and so you're profoundly bored. A cat wanders into the room, and one of your friends (let's call him James) asks you whether it's a male or female cat. Is the proper response:

1) Vote on the sex of the cat. Take a poll of those people who are sitting around you and ask them not "Is the cat male or female" but "What do you believe about the cat's sex?" Simple majority wins.

2) Check.

The proper response, which is to say the response that acknowledges the objectivity of reality, is "Check". If you and your friends all want the cat to be male, that doesn't stop it from being female (if it happens to be female) nor did it influence the cat to become male because you all wanted it to be. It simply is either male or female, and the correct answer is the one with the most independent evidence to back it up. It doesn't matter how you check (presumably, you'd just look at the genitalia, but if that makes you feel funny, I'm sure there are other ways of determining a cat's sex, though unfortunately I don't know them as I have no concept of cat physiology), only that you check and that you be able to back up your answer with evidence that isn't dependent upon what you want the answer to be.

Unless you're in Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma House of Representatives Education committee has approved House Bill 2211, a "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act". There are some bits of it that are simply redundant, like Section 5, which states that students are allowed to organize prayer groups and "see you at the pole" gatherings before, during and after school to the same extent that other groups are allowed to form non-religious clubs that have nothing do do with curriculum, which I'm pretty sure they're already allowed to do. I know, for example, and this is only anecdotal, that there were "See You at the Pole" gatherings at my high school, though I never attended. And really, so long as everyone's allowed to go to everything, I could not be more supportive (though I'm somewhat curious about the "during" school thing, because I don't know that any extracurricular clubs had meetings during school). This is how the whole "prayer in school" issue is solved. You don't have the teachers leading prayer in their capacity as employees of the state, and kids are allowed to pray/worship however they want, as long as it's not disruptive to other students learning. Which is fine, because you're not allowed to disrupt other students if you're doing it for non-religious reasons either (standing up and singing "Paradise City" during a test, while amusing and actually happened once in high school, isn't something they encourage, and so I have no problem with asking Little Bobby to sit down and stop reciting the Namokar Mantra.) I'm somewhat skeptical of a "moment of silence" before the day starts, because it's my understanding you could just pray for the few minutes before the day starts on your own without the school telling you to, but I'm not going to get into that here. So yes. That part of the bill, from my view, is redundant and pointless, but then this is a legislature, and so that sort of goes without saying.

The part that's got everyone all hot and bothered is this.

Section 4. Students may express their beliefs about religion in homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions. Homework and classroom assignments shall be judged by ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance and against other legitimate pedagogical concerns identified by the school district. Students shall not be penalized or rewarded on account of the religious content of their work.

The problem, as a others have pointed out, is that the way that section is phrased, it becomes impossible to penalize a student who gives an incorrect answer in, say, a science class as long as the student claims that it's based on their religious beliefs. As the second linked article points out, it becomes illegal for a school to take off points if, in a science class, a student claims the earth is 6000 years old, despite the fact that the scientific evidence points to the Earth being roughly 4.5 billion years old. It's an attempt to change reality by governmental fiat, and subverts everything that science is supposed to be about.

A significant theme in the Creationist movement recently has been appealing to "fairness", which is fine and good, except that facts are not determined by what we wish them to be. The exclusion of religious interpretations of creation from science classes isn't a form of religious persecution, it's the exclusion of theories which have no scientific evidence to support them and are not falsifiable. Attempting to paint them as persecution is not only intellectually dishonest, but is actually an insult to those people around the world who actually are persecuted for their beliefs, or their non-belief.

So yes. Unnecessary-to-actively anti-education bill has passed in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives. Hopefully, the State Senate will recognize it for what it is and discard it. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Oh, one last thing. The bill was formally authored by State Rep. Sally Kern, who has come into some trouble in the past few days for some virulently anti-gay comments that were recorded and posted on YouTube. I'll have my opinion up on that sometime tomorrow.