West Virginia dodged a bullet – Senate Bill 619 – which, if enacted, would have allowed teaches to teach “(non) intelligent design”

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It’s clear the problem isn’t going to vanish. A disturbing number of politicians these days seem to have decided that their route to success is through attacking public education. As this year’s crop of legislation shows, science education is not immune. Moreover, there are signs that these political attacks are growing less subtle and more extreme. West Virginia’s Senate Bill 619 was the first bill for a long while to mention “intelligent design” by name.

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(From the National Center for Science Education – which I have been a member of for twenty years or so. I don’t teach Human Evolution anymore, and haven’t for 15 years but remain concerned with efforts to purge Darwinian theory of Evolution from public education in the name of religious nonsense from certain well known quarters)

West Virgina just dodged a bullet, and the name of the bullet was Senate Bill 619. If enacted, the bill would have allowed teachers in the state’s public schools to teach “intelligent design as a theory of how the universe and/or humanity came to exist”. Such utter gobbledygook.

You’d think that after the legal defeat of “intelligent design” in the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court Case Kitzmiller vs. Dover in neighboring Pennsylvania, West Virginia legislators would be wary of passing a bill that would compromise science education and violate the U.S. Constitution.

But with no meaningful discussion, let alone hearing from experts on science and on science education the bill was swiftly passed by the Senate Education Committee and then by the Senate before it landed with the House Education Committee.

NSCE was monitoring the situation from the day the bill was introduced. But that was not all. They also:

• Repeatedly encouraged supporters in West Virginia to take action
• Alerted local and national media to the story as it developed
• Formulated talking points and media strategy and circulated them to allies
• Rallied like-minded organizations to alert their members and to express their opposition to the bill
• Discussed legal strategies with state and national civil liberties organizations  in the event that the bill passed

The bill did not pass/ Although it was on the House Education Committee’s agenda for a few uneasy days, the committee didn’t get around to it before the legislative session ended.

As the recent tussle in West Virginia confirmed, NCSE is the only organization with the expertise and the experience needed to coordinate effective opposition to bills that, like that state’s Senate Bill 619, threaten the integrity of science education.

Senate Bill 619 was only one o among a flurry of bills that NCSE was monitoring in the early months of 203 (see U.S. map above). Few of those bills ever stand a chance of passage. But you never know which will be the exception. So we vigilantly monitor every single one of them.

It’s clear the problem isn’t going to vanish. A disturbing number of politicians these days seem to have decided that their route to success is through attacking public education. As this year’s crop of legislation shows, science education is not immune. Moreover, there are signs that these political attacks are growing less subtle and more extreme. West Virginia’s Senate Bill 619 was the first bill for a long while to mention “intelligent design” by name.

And worse may be on the way. When Senate Bill 619 was in the House Education Committee, a supportive legislator told a local television station, “If this bill does not go through my heart is broken, but I do plan to amend the bill to include biblical creation.”

NSCE’s work is essential to defeating legislation that attacks science education. And your support is essential to NCSE’s work. Please give today

Signed, Gleen Branch

Diego Rivera Paints Darwin, father (along with Alfred Wallace) of the theory of natural selection, the basis of modern biology and evolutionary theory. Easily the most important scientific discovery of the 19th century, under attack today from certain bigoted, well funded quarters. What would Darwin say about human extinction?