By my coblogger
Brent Rasmussen
Larry Booher, the Roanoke, Virginia high school biology teacher who has been secretly teaching creationism to his students for 15 years using his own homemade 500-page textbook, thought it was okay to break the law because no one was complaining.
Now his creationism lessons are bearing damaged fruit in the form of ignorant students who all claim that "evolution is a religion too".
[link] "Larry Booher didn't use poor judgment; the system did when it chose to separate church and state. In school, we have to learn in every classroom in different ways because people are afraid to talk of religion even though evolution is a religion as well that requires plenty of faith."
Read the rest of the letters on the page linked above to see for yourself that I am not exaggerating in the slightest.
By all accounts, Larry Booher is an excellent teacher. He is such an excellent teacher that all of his students love him, and his colleagues respect him. He is such an excellent teacher, that no matter what he teaches, he teaches it well - regardless of it's legality, Constitutionality, or truth.
And that's what he has done all those years by offering his homemade textbook, Creation Battles Evolution to his public high school students for "extra credit". He has been teaching the non-scientific, religious creation story from the Christian religion to his public high school students in a biology class. And teaching it well. So well, that one of his young students defends the illegal nature of the teacher's 15-year long criminal career:
"It may be against the law, you say, but he always said, If you don't want to hear it, you don't have to listen. If anyone had a problem with it, why didn't they say anything during the year? Look, he's taught it for two decades no one complained! I really don't think it was a problem.
"You say school isn't a place to talk about these things, just because of the law. Yes, he took a risk most teachers wouldn't dare take, but I know it's a good thing he did."-Deleted Name, age 16
The fact that Larry Booher is a good teacher, and the fact that he is a popular teacher with both his students and his colleagues, does not make it "A-Okay" for him to break the law or to use his position as a government representative, taking his salary from public monies, to preach his own, personal, wacky religious beliefs to public school students in the "captive environment" of a school classroom. I GUARANTEE that a biology teacher who made a 500-page textbook entitled Creation Battles Evolution, but was instead based on the extensive writings of the Islamic creationists of the Harun Yahya group, then the teacher would have been fired - and probably lynched by the angry townsfolk.
The lack of outrage, and the support this man is getting from his mostly-Christian community, should scare the pants off of any American who values our wise secular Constitution. This sort of blatant disregard of the Constitution indicates that we are indeed headed - if not into an overt theocracy right now - into a climate which makes theocratic abuses by government officials (like public high school biology teachers) seem reasonable to the majority of folks in our country. It lays the groundwork for a wholesale re-writing of our Constitution to remove or change the religious freedoms that we enjoy in order to enforce the Dominionist philosophy of a "Christian Nation".
No, sorry Joe (Warning, link "Joe" connects to the Evangelical Outpost, a hard core wingnut site chock full of folks who I've been round and round with on every issue you can imagine until I couldn't stomach them anymore; you have been warned). I respect you, but you are 100% wrong when you claim that this country is not heading in this dangerous direction.
[link] To believe that America is "heading in the direction of theocracy" requires either a complete lack of knowledge about Christianity or degree of willful ignorance and gullibility that is found only among Holocaust deniers and paranoids who believe the moon-landing was a hoax. I suspect, though, that the majority of those who make such calumniating statements do so out of a sense of political futility. Unable to convince the majority of their fellow Americans to agree with their radical politics, they resort to libel in order to vilify those with whom they disagree.
All it takes, Joe, is to read the news every day. I don't have a radical political bone in my body. I do not libel anyone, I simply lay it out there with as much evidence as I can to support my opinion. And my opinion, based on the available evidence, leads me to believe that we are indeed headed for a Christian theocracy in this country. All I want is for the Constitution to be the law of the land. That's all. That means that public school teachers cannot teach religion to public school students, secretly, with homemade textbooks. It doesn't restrict their parents from teaching them about their religion, nor does it restrict the teacher, in their private life, from practicing their own religion.