Re: Oklahoma religious movement in public education

On 3/29/2025 11:10 AM, RonO wrote:

On 3/29/2025 9:02 AM, Rufus Ruffian wrote:

RonO wrote:
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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/battle-religion- schools-oklahoma-decide-future-first-amendment-rcna191114
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Apparently the attempt to use the Bible as a textbook has been blocked
by the state's supreme court, but they are likely to appeal to the
supreme court eventually.  The claim is that Judeo-Christian religious
belief is an important component for understanding Western civilization
and history.  Just think of how much of classic literature has Biblical
references (probably a lot of them would be banned by the religious
bigots in Oklahoma if they could).
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It should be noted that COPE (the ID Network turned into COPE in order
to sell the switch scam without having ID in the name of their
organization) failed to sell the switch scam to Oklahoma for more than a
decade.  The Oklahoma creationist rubes would not bend over for the
switch scam if they could not tell the students the religious reason for
the obfuscation and denial.
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Instead Oklahoma is trying a more honest and open approach to getting
their religious notions into the public schools.  The article indicates
that the current US Supreme court may be open to the current ploy.
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Ron Okimoto

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Ron, the info you share about H5N1 is great. It's important stuff that
doesn't get enough attention. Thanks for posting it here to this very
limited audience.
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You get a bit wrought when you're up on step, over ID perps and
scammers. The repetitive demonization distracts from your otherwise
lucid points.
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Can you explain what you mean about the "bait and switch scam"? Who are
the baiters, what bait are they offering to whom, and what's their
switcheroo? Is it Discovery types trying to convince YECers they have
science to support YECism, then trying to sell them ID science instead,
or something completely different? I don't quite get that. TIA!
>

 It should be common knowledge that the intelligent design creationist scam started out as a means to recreate a theocracy that the members believed had once existed in the US.  They started the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture a the Discovery Institute in order to implement their Wedge Strategy for getting that done.
 http://web.archive.org/web/19980114111554/http://discovery.org/crsc/ aboutcrsc.html
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy
 https://ncse.ngo/wedge-document
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorum_Amendment#:
 Utah Law review article:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030323095628/http://law.gonzaga.edu/people/ dewolf/utah.pdf
 Teaching the Controversy: Darwinism, Design and the Public School Science Curriculum:
https://arn.org/docs/dewolf/guidebook.htm
It should be noted that Meyer was the director of the ID scam unit and DeWolf was head of Legal for the Discovery Institute.
  The ID perps at the Discovery Institute believed that they could use their creation science as a wedge to break the strangle hold that they believed real science had on society.  They initially changed the name of what they were doing from scientific creationism to intelligent design.  They believed that getting their religious beliefs taught as science in the public schools was the best means for reestablishing a theocracy that they believed had been subverted in this country.  The ID perps understood that what they were calling intelligent design had already been designated as not worth teaching in the public schools by the Supreme Court, so they started claiming that they had a scientific theory of intelligent design to teach in the public schools.  The Wedge document (published in 1998) had getting ID taught in the public schools of 10 states as one of it's 5 year goals.
 The ID perps published their teach ID scam booklet in 1999 and a Utah Law Review Article claiming that it was legal to teach intelligent design theory in the public schools in 2000.  In 2000 they made a big deal about the Santorum "amendment" to the no child left behind legislation claiming it as support for teaching intelligent design in the public schools.  Their Santorum "amendment" claims brought them national attention even though the "amendment" did not get into the legislation, but could be found in an Appendix.  Several states started talking about teaching intelligent design in their public schools.
 Ohio was the first state to step forward an try to teach the junk.  The ID perps were invited to give their presentation to the Ohio State School board in March 2002.  The board also invited some real scientists to provide their input on the issue.  It turned out that the ID perps understood that they did not have the ID science to teach in Ohio, and before they gave their dog and pony show before the Ohio Board they had decided to start running a bait and switch scam instead.  From Ohio in 2002 to the present they have only used ID as bait in order to try to get the creationist rubes to bend over for their obfuscation and denial switch scam that does not mention that ID nor creationism ever existed.
 Wells participated in running the first bait and switch on Ohio, and this is his report on the event:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110814145400/http://www.creationists.org/ archived-obsolete-pages/2002-03-11-OSBE-wells.html
 QUOTE:
Steve Meyer and I (in consultation with others) had decided ahead of
time that we would not push for including intelligent design (ID) in the
state science standards, but would propose instead that the standards
include language protecting teachers who choose to teach the controversy.
END QUOTE:
 After listening to the real scientists and the waffling of the ID perps the members of the Ohio board understood that there was no ID science worth teaching in their public schools because one board member made the proposal that Ohio change the definition of science in the then current state science standards.  The board member wanted the definition changed so that ID could be taught in the public schools.  Even though the board understood that they were having the bait and switch run on them they bent over for the switch scam and tried to teach it in their public schools.  To this day they are the only state that tried to define what could be taught as a lesson plan.
 After Ohio ID has only been used as bait to sell the rubes the obfuscation and denial switch scam.  The bait and switch has been mostly failure for the ID perps and only a couple of other states have adopted the switch scam, but Louisiana and Texas have had to have the bait and switch run on them again because they both tried to use the switch scam to teach ID and creationism in their public schools.  The ID perps had to remind the creationist rubes that the switch scam had nothing to do with ID nor creationism in 2013.  Nearly all of the states that have had the bait and switch run on them have dropped the issue instead of bend over for the switch scam.
 The ID perps suffered a spectacular failure of the Bait and Switch in 2005 in Dover Penn..  The bait and switch had become routine and had probably been run on a couple dozen school boards and legislators by the time Dover hit the fan, and Seth Cooper had the job at the ID scam unit for making sure that the bait and switch went down on any creationist rubes stupid enough to want to teach the junk, but Seth Cooper did not follow up on his phone call to the Dover School board, and the Dover creationists were stupid and ignorant enough to not know that the Discovery Institute was responsible for the teach ID scam, and decided to teach the junk anyway in spite of Cooper's attempt to get them to teach the switch scam instead.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District
 QUOTE:
This story made the York newspapers, and Buckingham was telephoned by Discovery Institute staff attorney Seth Cooper, whose tasks included "communicating with legislators, school board members, teachers, parents and students" to "address the topic of ID in a scientifically and educationally responsible way" in public schools. He later stated that he made the call to "steer the Dover Board away from trying to include intelligent design in the classroom or from trying to insert creationism into its cirriculum [sic]", an account Buckingham has disputed. Cooper sent the book and DVD of Icons of Evolution to Buckingham, who required the Dover High School science teachers to watch the DVD. They did not take up the opportunity to use it in their classes.
END QUOTE:
 ID was found to not be any type of science worth teaching in the public schools in the Kitzmiller decision.  Phillip Johnson (credited with developing the Wedge strategy for the ID scam) sat in the court room every day of testimony and came to the conclusion that there had never been any ID science to teach in the public schools.  Johnson was the only ID perp that I recall "retiring" from the ID scam one month after the bait and switch started in Ohio, but he came back to support teaching ID in the public schools for the Dover fiasco.  After Dover I do not recall Johnson ever supporting teaching intelligent design in the public schools again.
 https://web.archive.org/web/20070609171527/http:/ sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles/issue10/evolution.pdf
 QUOTE:
“I considered [Dover] a loser from the start,” Johnson begins. “Where you have a board writing a statement and telling the teachers to
repeat it to the class, I thought that was a very bad idea.” The jaw drops further when he continues:
 I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent
design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to prove…No product is ready for competition in the educational world.
QUOTE:
 QUOTE:
For his part, Johnson agrees: “I think the fat lady has sung for any
efforts to change the approach in the public schools…the courts are
just not going to allow it. They never have. The efforts to change thingsin the public schools generate more powerful opposition than accomplish anything…I don’t think that means the end of the issue at all.”
 “In some respects,” he later goes on, “I’m almost relieved, and glad. I think the issue is properly settled. It’s clear to me now that the public schools are not going to change their line in my lifetime. That isn’t to me where the action really is and ought to be.”
END QUOTE:
 Even though Johnson admitted that the scam was blown the ID perps at the Discovery Institute could not give up on their wedge goals, and using ID as bait was the only way forward for them.  ID is just offered as bait in order to get the creationist rubes to bend over for the obfuscation and denial switch scam.  Keeping the students as ignorant as possible is their means to further their Wedge political goals.
 Educator's briefing packet first published in 2007 and updated around every 3 years since.  There was a 2021 version, but they reformated the site and seem to have reverted to the 2018 version:
https://www.discovery.org/f/1453/
 They claim that the Dover decision was wrong and that it is still legal to teach ID in the public schools outside of Dover, but every single group of creationist rube school boards or legislators that take the bait have had to bend over for the switch scam or drop the issue.  The majority have dropped the issue.  I only recall Texas and Louisiana adopting switch scam junk after Dover until West Virginia had the bait and switch run on them in 2024.  Even though the legislator had to remove mentioning ID from the legislation and replace it with switch scam language, she still claimed that the legislation would allow teaching ID in the public schools.  The ID perps had to step forward and tell her that the switch scam has nothing to do with ID and that the Discovery Institute did not support teaching ID in the public schools. Luskin is running the bait and switch on the rubes now, and he is one of the authors of the Educator's briefing packet that tells the rubes that it is still legal to teach ID in the public schools.
 For the last 23 years the ID perps have just been perpetrating a bait and switch scam on hapless, stupid and dishonest creationist rubes.  All ID has been is bait.  They have done nothing else with ID.
 Ron Okimoto
 

I should add that when I started to call the Discovery Institute creationist fellows ID perps the bait and switch had gone down on 100% of the creationist rubes that had wanted to teach the junk in their public schools for over 2 years.  The Seth Cooper wiki quote above indicates that the Discovery Institute was employing someone to make sure that the switch scam went down on all those who took the bait.
Both creationist legislators and state school boards had been victims of the Discovery Institutes ID bait and switch scam.  The bait and switch had even gone down on local school boards like the Dover rubes turned out to be about half a year after I had started calling the scam what it obviously was.  This was in 2004, and there wasn't any vehement objections on TO because both the creationists and TO regulars knew what was going on.  ID had first come to TO in the 1990's as something that could be taught in the public schools.  Phillip Johnson had made teaching ID in the public schools a major part of the Wedge strategy.
The main objection that I got on TO at that time was that the switch scam was not much different than the original Teach the Controversy ID scam.  This was true, originally ID was part of the controversy that the ID perps wanted to teach.  The Ohio Model Lesson plan demonstrated that the switch scam was just the usual creationist obfuscation and denial of existing science.  The obfuscation and denial was a major part of the Teach the Controversy creationist ploy.  Wells (one of the original ID perps) had published his book Icons of Evolution in 2000.  Most of the obfuscation and denial had been used by the Scientific creationists for decades before the ID perps used the same material.  The Wellsian lie of "no moths found on tree trunks" got into the initial draft of the Ohio lesson plan and had to be rewritten.  The switch scam is just the creationist obfuscation and denial without being able to mention why they are lying to the students.  The Ohio rubes wanted to teach creationism in their public schools, but all they ended up with was the obfuscation and denial junk, and were told that they could not mention that ID nor creationism ever existed.  They screwed up because they were a dishonest bunch of creationists, and the original draft still had creationist web links in it and these were claimed to be resources for teachers.  They also had stupidly included the Wellsian lie in the lesson plan, so the web links were deleted and all mention of ID perps were deleted.  They even deleted the citation to Wells' book even though it had obviously been used to create the lesson plan.
The teach ID scam guide book published in 1999.  This guide book remains avaliable at ARN (ARN is the sales arm of the ID perps and is where they sell their books and other junk).  The ID perps never retracted anything that they wrote in this guide book.  All the authors were fellows of the Discovery Institute.  Meyer was director of the ID scam unit, DeWolf was head of legal, and DeForrest claimed to be a fellow of the Discovery Institute on his Gonzaga web page, but like REMINE he was never listed as a fellow on the Discovery Institute web page, that I know of.
https://arn.org/docs/dewolf/guidebook.htm
QUOTE:
9. Conclusion
Local school boards and state education officials are frequently pressured to avoid teaching the controversy regarding biological origins. Indeed, many groups, such as the National Academy of Sciences, go so far as to deny the existence of any genuine scientific controversy about the issue. 160 Nevertheless, teachers should be reassured that they have the right to expose their students to the problems as well as the appeal of Darwinian theory. Moreover, as the previous discussion demonstrates, school boards have the authority to permit, and even encourage, teaching about design theory as an alternative to Darwinian evolution-and this includes the use of textbooks such as Of Pandas and People that present evidence for the theory of intelligent design.
The controlling legal authority, the Supreme Court's decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, explicitly permits the inclusion of alternatives to Darwinian evolution so long as those alternatives are based on scientific evidence and not motivated by strictly religious concerns. Since design theory is based on scientific evidence rather than religious assumptions, it clearly meets this test. Including discussions of design in the science curriculum thus serves an important goal of making education inclusive, rather than exclusionary. In addition, it provides students with an important demonstration of the best way for them as future scientists and citizens to resolve scientific controversies-by a careful and fair-minded examination of the evidence.
END QUOTE:
The ID perps obviously wanted to teach their ID scam science, and claimed that the book Of Pandas and People could be used to teach the junk in the public schools.  The Dover rubes purchased Of Pandas and People for that purpose when they blew off the bait and switch and tried to teach the ID creationist scam junk anyway.
Thaxton edited Of Pandas and People, Kenyon was one of the main authors, Meyer wrote the teachers notes for the book, and Behe admitted to writing some of the book, but was not credited.  All of them were among the original ID perps that started the ID scam unit of the Discovery Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People
All this means that the bait and switch scam should have been common knowledge among both creationists and the science side on TO for decades.  As a side note about the Wellsian lie about "No moths found on tree trunks", I was posting at ARN at the time that the draft of the Ohio Model Lesson plan was released by the Ohio board.  At that time (2003) most of the IDiots on ARN had given up on teaching the junk in the public schools (the bait and switch scam had gone down at least a dozen times by that time) but there were a few IDiots that still believed that ID would be taught in the Ohio public schools.  Their hopes were dashed when the final draft deleted the creationist web links and all mention of ID perps, and the Wellsian lie had been corrected. Someone on ARN wanted to defend the Wellsian lie as an "exaggeration". Fictional Vulcan logic to defend the bogus creationist bait and switch scam.  After it was clear that the bait and switch had gone down and that no ID was going to be taught in Ohio, Mike Gene admitted that he had given up on teaching the ID scam junk back in 1999 (this was in 2003).  Mike Gene had admitted to attending the ID perp conferences, and apparently he had understood very early that they were not going to be able to teach any of their junk.  Mike Gene continued to support the use of ID as bait until the failure of ID in Dover, and the Ohio State board of education dropped their switch scam junk in 2007.  Someone on TO posted the response from Uncommon Descent to Mike Gene quiting the ID scam and admitting that the ID science had never existed in 2007.
So I has started to call ID the scam that it has been for over 23 years, and the ID perps the perpetrators of the bait and switch scam since there was absolutely no doubt about what they were doing.  The bait and switch had been going down for over 2 years in 100% of the cases where the creationist rubes had wanted to teach ID, and the bait and switch has continued to this day because even after the fiasco in Dover, the ID perps just doubled down, and started claiming that the Dover decision was wrong, and that it was still legal to teach ID in the public schools outside of Dover Penn (the federal court decision only applied to the middle federal court district of Penn.).  They kept putting out ID as bait, but in 100% of the cases they have run the bait and switch, and all the creationist rubes have ever gotten is the obfuscation and denial switch scam that cannot mention that ID nor creationism ever existed. Nearly all the creationists that have had the bait and switch run on them have dropped the issue instead of bend over for the switch scam because they do not want to teach the students enough science for them to understand what they need to deny if they can't tell them why they are lying to the students.
The dishonest creationists that bent over and took the switch scam did so for dishonest reasons, and they all have used the switch scam to try to teach ID and or creationism in their public schools.  The recent case in West Virginia had the legislator forced to replace teaching ID with switch scam language that did not mention ID nor creationism, and she still claimed that the legislation would allow teaching ID in the public schools.  All the rubes that have tried to use the switch scam to teach ID have had the bait and switch run on them again.  That is the kind of creationist rube that take the bait at this late date in the bait and switch scam.
Ron Okimoto