DefCon Blog

We wanted to let you all know that this will be our last blog post, at least for now. Our funding has run out, so we will be taking a break. We want to make it clear that this is in no way an admission of defeat, we’ve had some spectacular successes and it is clear that the religious right is on the run! Thanks to all of you, we’ve been able to fight the teaching of creationism in public schools, fight for stem cell research, run national ads showing Jack Abramaoff’s ties to religious right leaders, and in general shed an important light on the hypocrisy of the religious right. We’re going to leave the thread open for a few weeks so that you all can make connections. We really value this community, and hope to reconnect with you all sometime in the future. Thank you for all you’ve done to help in the fight to defend our Constitution.

Today Georgia’s Governor decided to finally take action around the devastating drough that continues to wreak havoc on much of the South. Did he finally impose strick water conservation measures, you ask? No, he held a prayer service on the steps of the capital building. According to the Associated Press:

As metropolitan Atlanta’s water supplies drain to record lows, many across the Southeast have criticized Perdue and other Georgia officials for failing to introduce more stringent conservation measures.

Perdue, who wore a green suit and brown cowboy boots, seemed to acknowledge that the drought afflicting Georgia was a man-made, as well as natural, problem. Georgians, he said, had not done “all we could do in conservation.”

While many hoped that a miracle could end the drought, repentance was a recurring theme.

We’ll let you know if rain starts to fall..

Don’t forget to tune in to PBS tonight to watch a new documentary of the Dover Trial, Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.

It’s Friday, talk to us!

For the last several months, the Religious Right have been incredibly vocal in their opposition to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), as we told you about in September. In a victory against discrimination, and a defeat for the religious right, yesterday the House of Representatives passed the ENDA. According to The New York Times:

The House on Wednesday approved a bill granting broad protections against discrimination in the workplace for gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, a measure that supporters praised as the most important civil rights legislation since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 but that opponents said would result in unnecessary lawsuits.

According to Pacific Magazine, Answers in Genesis, the group behind the first Creation Museum, plans on building another museum on the island of Saipan, which is capital the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands:

A U.S.-based Christian ministry group wants to build a museum promoting a creationist museum on Saipan, and it has the backing of Northern Marianas Gov. Benigno Fitial, the Saipan Tribune reports.

Answers in Genesis Group President Ken Ham met with Fitial to discuss the project. Answers in Genesis built a $27 million Creation Museum in Kentucky, which opened in May. It wants to develop a similar facility on Saipan, which it says will be a major tourist attraction.

“Religion, education, and commerce and tourism — these are the elements that the AiG Group proposes to bring to the CNMI by establishing a base of operations here,” administration spokesman Charles P. Reyes, Jr. told the newspaper.

It’s Friday, talk to us!

So there is a new book out, written by Bob Heath, the leader of Kids for Christ USA, the purpose of which is to prove to Americans that the Bible is not, in fact, illegal in public schools. According to One News Now:

In his new book How Are You Doing That?, Heath talks about how students have every right to establish Bible and Christian clubs in public schools. He says the court’s decision makes it very clear that voluntary prayer and Bible-reading are completely legal in public schools.

However, as Ed Brayton over at Dispatches points out:

I would love to see Heath or anyone else find a quote from the ACLU or any other separationist group saying that the Supreme Court made the Bible illegal in public schools. That nonsense rhetoric has come exclusively from the religious right, not from our side. Then they wonder why some principals and administrators don’t understand the law.

Leave it to the Religious Right to take on their own propaganda.

Bobby Jindal’s recent victory to become Louiana’s Governor has gained national media attention. As we’ve told you in the past, Jindal has not been shy about his creationist leanings. So it’s not surprising that tucked away in the many articles about Jindal’s success are not insigificant paragraphs about his desire to see creationism taught in schools. Washington PostDavid Broder writes:

Jindal campaigned as a conservative reformer, saying he wanted to pass strict ethics rules for the notoriously out-of-bounds Legislature but vowing also to spur business growth and open classrooms to the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution.

And an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times states:

Red-state bloggers love his story and his stock Christian-right positions (no abortions, no exceptions; the Ten Commandments in government buildings; creationism in school curricula).

We’ll be monitoring Jindal as he transitions into his new position..

It’s Friday, what’s going on out there?

A 1955 paper widely used by creationists as proof that life on Earth couldn’t have happened without Divine intervention has been retracted by the author, who did not like the fact that creationists were using his paper to fuel their arguments. According to The New York Times:

In January 1955, Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, published a paper called “Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life” in American Scientist, the journal of Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society.

In it, Dr. Jacobson speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, “one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.”

Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. But today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want — from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention.

So after 52 years, he has retracted it.

Thanks to PZMyers over at Pharyngula for tipping us off.

According to a new study out of the University of Manchester in England, St. Bernard dogs have disproved the creationism theory:

Biologists from the University of Manchester say that changes to the skull shape of St Bernards over the last 120 years “can only be explained” via evolution and natural selection.

The research team analysed arrived at their findings by examining 47 St Bernard skulls donated to the National History Museum in Berne by Swiss breeders.

They claim that modern dogs have much broader skulls and more pronounced ridges, while a steeper angle is evident between their nose and foreheads.

According to the Orlando Sentinel for the first time, Florida public school children will explicitly learn about evolution:

Florida has written new standards for teaching science that for the first time say public-school students need to learn about evolution.

The proposed science standards, released Friday, call evolution one of the “big ideas” that must be taught as part of in-depth, hands-on learning.

Florida’s plan is part of a larger push to improve science education but could set off a battle over beliefs.

Current standards do not use the word evolution — long a controversial word in education — but do require teaching evolutionary concepts in public schools.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute in a 2005 report gave Florida an F for its current science standards, calling them “sorely lacking in content,” “thin” and “nebulous.” In particular, it criticized the “superficiality of the treatment of evolutionary biology.”

It’s Friday, talk to us!

Remember when we told you that Louisiana Rep. David Vitter had earmarked $100,000 of public money to fund the creationist group the Louisaiana Family Forum. According to The Times Picayune, Vitter has decided not to earmark the money, after all:

Vitter went to the Senate floor Wednesday and announced that “to avoid more hysterics,” he wanted to shift the money to science and computer labs in the Ouachita Parish schools. He said the earmark had been misconstrued.

“The project, which would develop a plan to promote better science-based education in Ouachita Parish by Louisiana Family Forum, has raised concerns among some that its intention was to mandate and push creationism within the public schools,” Vitter said. “That is clearly not and never was the intent of the project, nor would it have been its effect.”