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The following articles are from the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Volume 23, Number 4 (Winter 2007/2008).
Recent events in Austin, Texas, have those of us at the Council for Secular Humanism asking “Is history about to repeat itself?” The State of Texas has forced the state director of science curriculum out of her job because she forwarded e-mails about lectures on evolution. Christine Castillo Comer, with more than three decades of experience as an educator, had to resign after she forwarded an e-mail message about a talk to be given at Center for Inquiry/ Austin by Dr. Barbara Forrest, a critic of intelligent design. Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, is a fellow at the Center for Inquiry. Many of you may recall that Forrest served as a key expert witness in the famous Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. case in Dover, Pennsylvania.
CFI’s director of research and legal affairs, Ronald A. Lindsay, believes that Ms. Comer may have a cause of action against the state. “The facts are not entirely clear yet, but if Comer was forced to resign because she expressed a view on a matter of public concern, she may well have had her legal rights violated,” Lindsay observed. “Moreover, regardless of the legality of the state’s actions, it is incredible that in the twenty-first century an educator would be punished for saying something favorable about evolution. Does an educator have to be silent about the existence of pathogens or about the truth that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa? It appears that the Texas Taliban now controls education in that state.”
Paul Kurtz, chairman and founder of the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry, believes that the foundations of our democratic society are now under attack. “The social and scientific progress we take for granted has been advanced by a basic scientific philosophical point of view: scientific naturalism,” said Kurtz. “The methods of the sciences, and the assumptions upon which they are based, are being challenged culturally in the United States today as never before. Despite its success in providing us with unparalleled benefits, religious fundamentalists seek to inhibit free inquiry and to misrepresent the tested conclusions of scientific naturalism. We seem not to have come far culturally since the Scopes ‘monkey’ trial if educators risk their jobs promoting academic lectures on scientifically uncontroversial topics.”
This development may not bode well for Texas’s upcoming review of its science-education curriculum, the first since 2003, which will determine deciding what hundreds of thousands of children will be taught and what they will read in science classes. Chairing the State Board of Education will be fundamentalist Christian Don McLeroy, a creationist who was handpicked by Governor Rick Perry last summer. Governor Perry is an open supporter of intelligent design (ID) and has publicly indicated that he would like to see it taught in public schools alongside evolution. A member of the state Board of Education since 1998, McLeroy has voted to undermine evolutionary theory in textbooks, to ban textbooks that examine global warming and endangered species, and to require health textbooks that promote abstinence-only approaches to reproductive well-being.
The sheer size of the Lone Star State, in conjunction with California and Florida, has a large influence on which textbooks are used in the rest of the country.
Nathan Bupp and Henry Huber collectively make up the communications department for CSH and CFI.
In a major ruling affecting faith-based service providers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit unanimously decided on December 3 that the State of Iowa could not fund an inmate rehabilitation program called Inner Change Freedom Initiatives, which was run by Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries. The court concluded that the program was permeated with religion and that inmates enrolled in the program received more benefits than other inmates. The court noted that the InnerChange program was “dominated by Bible study, Christian classes, religious revivals, and church services.” Taken together, these factors indicated that the public funding of this program had the effect of advancing religion.
The case was brought by Americans United for Separation of Church and State on its own behalf and that of some inmates and Iowa taxpayers. The Center for Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism submitted an amicus brief authored by Legal Director Ronald A. Lindsay that supported Americans United.
David Koepsell, CSH executive director, praised the court’s ruling stating, “This decision reaffirms that public money cannot be used to support religious indoctrination, even if it supposedly serves some secular purpose. The Establishment Clause does not say that the government cannot promote religion except where it might do some good.” Koepsell added that, in any event, there was no empirical evidence to support the claim that the InnerChange program was more successful at rehabilitation than traditional secular programs.
Both CFI and CSH support secular counseling and treatment programs for individuals with substance abuse problems, such as the Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS). These programs have achieved success without any use of religious doctrines or a requirement that participants rely on a “Higher Power.”
The decision of the Eighth Circuit was unanimous and was joined by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was serving on the panel that decided the case by special designation. Legal Director Ronald A. Lindsay emphasized that the strongly worded, unanimous ruling of the court will prove helpful in preventing similar programs from being implemented in other parts of the country. “Prison Fellowship and similar organizations have been aggressively pushing their faith-based programs as the answer to inmate rehabilitation,” Lindsay observed. “This decision should stop this misguided effort to turn rehabilitation programs into publicly funded religious conversion programs.”
–Nathan Bupp
Recently, researchers announced that they were able to develop stem cells that appear to have the properties of embryonic stem cells by “reprogramming” adult body cells (often referred to as somatic cells). The technique involves inserting four genes into the somatic cells, which then “dedifferentiate” the cell. In other words, instead of having the characteristics of a skin cell, liver cell, or the cell of some other type of tissue, the cell appears to be pluripotent, just like embryonic stem cells, with the ability to become any cell type in the body. Hence, these new cells are referred to as “induced pluripotent stem cells” or “ips cells.”
CSH and CFI welcome this development but caution that it is incorrect and misleading for some opponents of embryonic stem-cell research to claim that there is no longer a need to conduct research using stem cells extracted from embryos. CFI Chair Paul Kurtz has criticized those opponents of research involving human embryos who are falsely asserting that this breakthrough somehow moots the controversy over embryonic stem-cell research stating, “First, it is premature to claim that this new technique will produce stem cells that can generate usable replacement tissue. More important, if we are going to make significant progress in developing therapies in the near future, researchers have to be able to utilize stem cells derived from all available methods, as most in the scientific community agree.” Kurtz adds that “abandoning research on stem cells derived from existing embryos would be scientifically and morally irresponsible.” He anticipates that the political and moral battles over embryonic stem-cell research will continue.
Moreover, the notion that stem cells derived through somatic cell reprogramming raise no moral issue whereas stem cells derived from existing embryos do present moral concerns, “simply demonstrates the incoherence of the claim that deriving stem cells from embryos is morally wrong,” explains Dr. Ronald A. Lindsay, author of CFI’s position paper on stem-cell research. (The paper is available here.) “The argument that human embryonic stem cell research is morally wrong is based principally on the alleged ‘potential’ of the embryo to become a human person. In other words, an acorn can become a tree, so we need to protect the acorn. But overlooked in all the excitement about ips cells is the fact that if you can induce a skin cell to become an embryonic stem cell, in principle you could also create an embryo using similar methodology.” Lindsay notes that researchers at the Whitehead Institute already have been successful in creating a mouse embryo derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, which indicates that all cells have the “potential” to become embryos. Lindsay observes, “I’m happy to hear that some opponents of research involving existing embryos will not oppose this new methodology, even though logically their double standard makes no sense. I suppose it just shows that some acorns are better than others.”
–Nathan Bupp
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