Stupid Science
When you get caught between the moon and OK City
by Barry Friedman
(First Appeared in
The Tulsa Voice)
God forbid—and HE will be along later—that the state’s students have unredacted access to science and culture without our representatives going into adverbial shock and singing, “What a friend we have in Jesus.”
Forget it, Jake, it’s Oklahoma.
It all started the week the legislature mercifully adjourned, when a House committee voted to reject a set of new science standards called the Oklahoma Academic Skills for Science. This was noteworthy because students here ranked 42nd nationally and “far below average” in science education.
House committee members still voted 10-1 against the new regulations because of what they called the proposal’s agenda-driven curriculum.
Representative Mark McCullough was reported to have said, “There’s been a lot of criticisms, in some sectors, as to maybe some of the hyperbole—what some consider hyperbole relative to climate change. I know it’s a very, very difficult, very controversial subject.”
For the love of Pat Sajak, it’s only controversial to those academics that consult Jenny McCarthy on vaccinations and cite Bishop Ussher for how old the earth is.
So what happened?
From the Oklahoma Science Teachers Association end-of-session update: “Technically, even though each chamber had voted against the standards, they hadn’t done so to the same bill [because the Senate amended the original] and so the effect is the same as if they had refused to act and the new standards are enacted as rules by default.”
Yes, a bill both chambers hated is now law because they didn’t hate it properly.
Days later, the full House rejected Common Core, the Senate voted for its own education standards, and the Governor went back to the residence.1
Common Core is a national initiative for the teaching of English and math, even if some maintain it was crafted in the pits of hell by Beelzebub and central planners. Rep. John Bennett said the initiative was "getting its claws" into Oklahoma's children in order to be indoctrinated in a U.N.-led agenda of "a sustainable world without borders.”
Forget the warnings from NASA and the U.S. military, the glaciers that have broken off in both West Antarctica and Greenland, and the rise in temperatures over the past thirty years2, students won’t learn about climate change because Jim Inhofe has a fondness for seasons and knows exactly where the Lord is. And Al Gore is fat—or something.
Really—a “U.N-led Agenda” to teach math? So, for the 1,294th time, Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntary set of goals passed by the UN in 1992. Ratified by 178 nations, including ours (George H.W. Bush approved), it concerns economic, social, and environmental development and, trust me, “Poppy” wouldn’t have signed it if there were any chance Southern Hills would be turned into a kibbutz.
Speaking of, what discussion on climate change would be complete without hearing from Oklahoma’s Grand High Exalted Denier?
“’ … as long as the earth remains,’” quoted Senator Jim Inhofe from Genesis recently on national radio, “’there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,’ my point is, God’s still up there.”
And there you have it.
Forget the warnings from NASA and the U.S. military, the glaciers that have broken off in both West Antarctica and Greenland, and the rise in temperatures over the past thirty years2, students won’t learn about climate change because Jim Inhofe has a fondness for seasons and knows exactly where the Lord is. And Al Gore is fat—or something.
One more thing, in an effort to show the corrosive cultural effects of Common Core, State Sen. Josh Brecheen attempted to read, on the Senate floor, from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” but came down with the vapors3, at one point spelling out the word g-e-n-i-t-a-l-s and then reading aloud, “the tightness of her … uh … v … uh, I’ll leave it to your imagination.” Then, begging for someone to “gavel me down,” Brecheen continued, barely getting out the words “gigantic” and “genitals” before stopping. The book, he concluded, was “miserably graphic” (twice), before reminding members they had a choice to live in Oklahoma under the “tenth amendment where we can have our Christian values.”
(Here's the link. The bats start leaving the belfry around the 8.30 mark)
Stunned. Simply stunned.
Toni Morrison, incidentally, is a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize Winner who once said, “I have visited Oklahoma and was impressed by its natural beauty—so unlike the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ scenes. What I learned was the nature of the promise it held for African-Americans looking for safety and prosperity—some highly successful stories and some failures.”
So, it’s not just global warming, evolution, biology, geometry, and chemistry that state legislators want to keep away from children. It’s a voice like this: an honest, beautiful, necessary, hopeful—yes, at times, brutal—voice that could tell them something about Oklahoma, something about themselves.