Indiana legislature – Page 10

Legislative Whack-A-Mole

As I noted in yesterday’s post, our intrepid legislators are hard at work making fools of themselves on the taxpayers’ dime. There’s the effort to ban the non-existent use of Sharia law by the state’s judiciary, a bill prescribing how school children must sing the Star Spangled Banner (no, I am not making that up–and I’m not going to say anything more about it, either–too depressing), and the effort that will not die no matter how many courts rule it unconstitutional: a bill to allow the teaching of creationism in public school science classes.

What’s wrong with this effort by Senator Kruse (he of the “no Sharia” bill)? Ah, let me count the ways.

First of all, the Supreme Court has ruled that injecting “creation science” (as the bill calls it) into public school science classrooms, is unconstitutional. The reason? “Creation science” is not science. It is religion. In fact, the courts will allow creationism to be taught in classes on comparative religion.

Proponents of teaching this religious dogma in science class consistently betray an utter lack of understanding of what science is. First of all, they use the term “theory” to suggest that evolution is “just a theory.” What they clearly do not understand is that in science, the term “theory” has a specific meaning–and that meaning is very different from the way you and I use the term in casual conversation. The common use means “guess” or “speculation.” In science, a theory is constructed to explain the relationship of carefully documented empirical observations.

There is one common thread to the two meanings, however, and it is what sets science apart from religion or ideology: both our casual “theories” and scientific theories are falsifiable. That means they must be changed if new evidence emerges that warrants such change. The scientific method is built on this concept of falsification–scientists constantly challenge and test what they think they know, and modify their understandings accordingly. That is how science advances.

If a belief is rigid, if it is held despite facts that challenge all or part of it, it is by definition not science. (If Senator Kruse will explain how God can be dragged into a high school lab and tested, he might have–excuse the expression–a prayer.) Creationism is a matter of faith, and faith–again, by definition–is not science.

It probably goes without saying that in a state pursuing economic development through a variety of bio-science initiatives, passage of Kruse’s bill would send a very embarrassing message. Evolution, after all, is the necessary basis of biology. But what is most depressing about this exercise is its predictable futility. During the past decade or so, creation “science” has been authorized in Kansas and Pennsylvania and–predictably–struck down by the courts. (In Kansas, voters also went to the polls in droves to defeat the Kansas Board of Education members who’d made the state a national laughingstock). It’s like the game of “whack a mole”–you whap it here and it pops up there.

Meanwhile, the state’s real problems languish and the legislature’s real business is neglected.

I guess there’s a lesson here: don’t be some fancy-pants elitist who actually understands biology. And for goodness sake, watch how you sing the Star Spangled Banner…..

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At Least It’s A Short Session…..

My own children weren’t among those who feared monsters under the bed, but I had friends who regularly had to assure their toddlers that the room had been cleared of things that go bump in the night.

Those children evidently grew up to populate the Indiana General Assembly.

Senator Kruse has filed Senate Bill 90, aimed at preventing Indiana courts from applying Sharia law. Because that is so likely to happen here. This trend began last year in Oklahoma, and legal blogs report that in addition to Indiana, five states are considering such legislation: Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, South Carolina and Wyoming. (Not surprisingly, these are not states that top the educational achievement lists….)

Senate Bill 90 “Prohibits the enforcement of a foreign law (defined as a law established and used outside the jurisdiction of the United States) if the enforcement would violate a right granted by the Indiana or U.S. Constitution.” It prohibits people from entering into a contract to apply foreign law to contract disputes, and prohibits courts from transferring cases to other jurisdictions if the transfer is likely to “affect the constitutional rights of the nonmoving party.”

I’m not sure what effect this would have on the application of international trade laws, or the Law of the Sea, and it does appear to interfere with the right of two parties to decide for themselves what law will apply to their contracts. I’m not sure how judges are supposed to know whether courts in other jurisdictions–say New York or California–might rule in ways that the bill’s sponsor believes will “affect” the constitutional rights of the nonmoving party.

Indiana faces significant challenges. Unemployment remains stubbornly high. Our local governments are starving for resources. Our infrastructure needs outstrip our ability to address them. We continue to fight over the best way to improve our substandard schools. So our legislators have gotten really busy–outlawing Sharia law and promoting creationism. (More on that tomorrow.)

Given the language of the bill, it probably passes constitutional muster. So would a bill outlawing monsters under the bed.

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Why Do Gun Rights Trump All Other Rights?

As readers of this blog know, I’m a pretty rabid civil libertarian. But even I know that my right to free speech doesn’t mean I can stomp into your living room to harangue you. My right to free exercise of religion doesn’t include the right to impose that religion on students in my public university classroom. My right to petition my government for a redress of grievances doesn’t translate into a right to march into the legislature when it is in session and disrupt the proceedings.

In other words, the exercise of my rights is conditioned upon my willingness to respect the equal rights of others.

Granted, that little caveat is widely ignored by citizens who are absolutely convinced that they and they alone are in possession of Truth that must be imposed upon others despite the fact that those others may have Truths of their own. Nevertheless, respect for the equal rights of others is a foundational premise of our legal/constitutional system.

Those for whom the Second Amendment is less a statement of rights than a religion just don’t get that. They seem to believe that the Second Amendment trumps all the other provisions of the Bill of Rights. A couple of years ago, the Indiana legislature blithely ignored the rights of employers to determine what safety measures they would require, and passed a measure allowing workers to pack heat in the workplace. Now, a state representative has introduced a bill to allow students–and presumably others–to come armed to campus.

There are sound reasons why IUPUI and other universities do not want guns on campus. We have our share of immature students, troubled students, and far more troubled visitors. (There used to be a self-described “evangelist” who “preached” loudly on the plaza next to my building, calling female students “whores of Babylon” and ranting about various sins he attributed to passersby. I don’t think arming him would have been a great idea.) I know that gun lovers really believe arming students would prevent tragedies like Virginia Tech; I don’t share their sunny suppositions–my guess is it would be equally likely to increase the bloodshed. But whether I am correct or they are is not the point.

The point is that government should not be able to decide who can come armed into my home, my place of business or my office on campus.

Gun rights activists who are constantly criticizing government over-reach, constantly talking about limited government, ought to take a good hard look in the mirror. Their hypocrisy is showing.

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Bumper Sticker Solutions

The Indianapolis Star’s editorial this morning offers its glowing endorsement of the mischief created by our (thankfully concluded) legislative session. While the editorial understandably ignored the culture war aspects of the GOP agenda–the same-sex marriage ban, de-funding of Planned Parenthood, the anti-immigrant effort– it especially praised the slogans-masquerading-as-education-reforms measures.

I don’t pretend to understand why people react so differently to difference–i.e., large numbers of us distrust people from different cultures, different races or religions, but at the same time, eagerly embrace the belief that if we just throw away an old system and replace it with a shiny new one, no matter how dimly conceived, all will be well. So we shy away from the hard work of figuring out what it would take to reform public schools by encouraging all manner of un-vetted and arguably unqualified people to create private ones. With public money, of course.

Several years ago, I took a look at the voucher arguments and found them troubling. Time hasn’t ameliorated those concerns.

But it isn’t just vouchers. I have no problem theoretically with Charter schools, since they are by definition public. But not every for-profit college or politically-ambitious Mayor should be able to sponsor them. I am a big believer in teacher accountability, but I’m also leery of how we determine educational productivity. (Do we let the Principal decide which teachers are doing a good job? That seems calculated to create a lot of brown-nosed teachers. Do we use standardized test scores? Decades of research suggests that test scores correlate more highly with parental income than with teaching talent.) These questions and many others haven’t been addressed by our bumper-sticker sloganeers.

Different isn’t always worse. But it isn’t always better, either.

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Downside of Democracy

Many years ago, during a discussion with a friend whose husband served in the Indiana House, she said something I’ve always remembered: “The problem with representative democracy is that it is representative.”

This session of the Indiana Legislature seems intent on proving the point.

If you’ve been following national news, you may be thinking that those we elected to the General Assembly couldn’t possibly be as crazy as, for example, the South Dakota lawmaker who sponsored a bill that would have made it legal to shoot abortion doctors (he withdrew it in the wake of the publicity), or the Arizona legislator who responded to the horrific shootings in Tucson by sponsoring a bill to allow concealed guns to be carried anywhere, or the Wisconsin Governor who is threatening to call out the National Guard if public workers protest his efforts to strip them of bargaining rights they’ve had since the 1950s.

But you’d be wrong.

Think an anti-bullying bill should be a slam-dunk? Think again. The Senate Committee killed it on a 3-5 vote. Opponents expressed an uncharacteristic concern for the First Amendment rights of schoolchildren…especially their right to express anti-gay sentiments.

Speaking of child safety, surely a bill to require all child care providers to meet health and safety requirements—staff criminal history checks, fire safety, drug testing and the like—should be a no-brainer? Wrong! Advance America’s Eric Miller brought in God’s folks to testify that the bill gave government “too much authority over Church ministries,” and the bill died without a committee vote.

Wisconsin isn’t the only state trying to strip public employees of bargaining rights—here in Indiana, a bill to abolish Indiana’s merit system has emerged from committee. And Mike Delph’s effort to have Indiana emulate Arizona by targeting people who “look like” they might be illegal immigrants is moving along nicely (never mind that Arizona’s convention bookings declined 36% in the wake of that state’s law, and never mind that immigration is an exclusively federal responsibility).

And of course, our “representative representatives” aren’t content with defeating the anti-bullying bill, and reviving the bill to amend the Indiana Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Taking their war against gay Hoosiers up a notch, there’s an upcoming committee vote on a bill to prohibit state universities from providing domestic partner benefits.

The haters and the crazies are well represented in the Indiana General Assembly. The rest of us, not so much.

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