Colorado Committee Kills Bill Giving Legal Protections To Teaching Climate Change Denial And Creationism In Schools

By Public Lands Team on Feb 8, 2013 at 2:54 pm

By Jessica Goad

Earlier this week, a key legislative committee in Colorado voted down a bill that would give teachers at the state’s schools and colleges legal cover to teach the questioning of climate change and other subjects that “cause controversy” in the classroom. The bill directed teachers to:

… create an environment that encourages students to intelligently and respectfully explore scientific questions and learn about scientific evidence related to biological and chemical evolution, global warming, and human cloning.

H.B. 13-1089 was sponsored by Rep. Stephen Humphrey (R) who explained:

This bill is not a curriculum change that would force educators to teach intelligent design or creationism. It simply provides legal protections to those teachers who would like to provide their students with a complete education on both the strengths and weaknesses of these hotly debated scientific subjects.

The Colorado House Education Committee, of which Democrats are the majority, voted down the bill on a party line vote.

Colorado is not the only state to see such bills, even if their radical anti-science message did not gain traction there. Legislators in five other states have introduced bills allowing teachers to deny evolution and climate change. Interestingly, they all bear resemblance to “model” legislation that has been promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative corporate front-group that puts together draft bills for use by state legislators.

In the past, ALEC has drafted model bills such as the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act,” which requires teachers to “encourage an atmosphere of respect for different opinions and open-mindedness to new ideas.” ALEC has also been behind bills that block putting a price on carbon, turn over public lands to states and private companies, and roll back state renewable electricity standards. One of the co-sponsors of the bill in the Colorado Senate is a dues-paying member of ALEC.

The Heartland Institute, an extremist group that once compared people who believe in global warming to the Unabomber, has also been linked to these types of bills. Heartland is still a member of the ALEC task force that originally wrote the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act, and is also designing climate-denial curriculum.

The fight over teaching climate change denial in schools has just begun. As Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education put it:

This victory in Colorado was too close. People in Colorado and elsewhere need to understand that these bills would be nothing but trouble: scientifically misleading, pedagogically unnecessary, and likely to produce administrative, legal, and economic headaches.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Center for the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Security

Bachmann Keeps Seat On Intelligence Committee Despite Discredited Anti-Muslim Witch Hunt

By Hayes Brown on Feb 8, 2013 at 2:51 pm

Rep. Michele Bachmann

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) will remain a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the 113th Congress — despite leading a widely discredited anti-Muslim witch hunt against government personnel last year.

According to the committee list released Friday, Bachmann will stay on the powerful committee despite calls from People for the American Way and others for Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) to remove her. Instead, Boehner in his statement making the announcement praised the lawmakers “charged sacred task of supporting that mission by ensuring the intelligence community has the resources and tools it needs to stay ahead of the evolving threats we face, and by conducting effective oversight of the administration.”

Dismay towards Bachmann’s continuing presence on the committee stems from her use of that position to lead a witch-hunt against then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin and other U.S. government personnel. In the letter sent to the State Department, Bachmann suggested that Abedin and others were allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking to infiltrate the U.S. government and affect policy decisions. The charges were clearly false, based mostly on the conspiracy theories of noted Islamophobe Frank Gaffney.

Bachmann’s actions split the Republican Party, with several prominent members — including former Speaker Newt Gingrich and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton — signing onto her conspiracies. Many other Republicans — including Boehner himself — abandoned Bachmann to her quixotic pursuit of imaginary infiltration. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), then-Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) and others joined President Obama and Clinton in condemning Bachmann’s scare tactics.

Joining Bachmann in being renamed to the committee are Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) and Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), who signed onto the original letter sent to State about Abedin. The clearly Islamophobic stances of these committee members makes their position on the committee, with its oversight of the National Security Agency and CIA’s activities, particularly troubling.

Bachmann in particular clearly learned nothing from her experience smearing Abedin. Not only did she stand by the content of her letter to State, as recently as December, but she also compared a letter from a Muslim advocacy group to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. (HT: Faiz Shakir)

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Justice

California Democrats Propose Strictest Gun Regulations In The Nation

By Zack Beauchamp on Feb 8, 2013 at 2:40 pm

California Democrats present gun violence prevention plan.

Thursday afternoon, a group of California Senate Democrats rolled out a legislative package that would create what would likely be the tightest gun regulation system in the nation, ranging from sweeping prohibitions on semi-automatic rifles to restrictions on guns in the home. The proposal consists of ten points:

1. Ban all semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines. California’s assault weapons ban only restricts the possession of semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines if they have an additional, “military-style” feature like flash suppressors. The new laws would tighten this law by banning all such rifles regardless of external features.

2. Ban possession of high-capacity magazines. California law bans the transfer, not possession, of magazines that can hold over ten bullets. This allows people wanting to skirt the law to buy the constituent parts and make the magazines themselves. The new law would close that loophole.

3. Ban “bullet button” conversion kits. State law defines “detachable magazines” as, in part, magazines that can be released “without the use of a tool.” Bullet button kits allow magazines to be released quickly by pressing a bullet into them, thus creating an end-around the intent of the assault weapons ban. The new provisions would ban such kits.

4. Bans shotgun-rifle combinations. It would ban this class of class of weapon.

5. Universal registration of all guns. The law would create “ownership records consistently across-the-board, ensuring all firearms are recorded” so that the background check system can prevent criminals from getting guns.

6. Background checks on ammunition. This provision requires a “full and complete” background check on ammunition sales, “building on” laws existing in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

7. Regulating gun loans. The legislators propose setting up an as-yet undefined regulatory system for the loan, as opposed to sale, of guns.

8. Prevent prohibited individuals from living in homes with guns. California’s Armed Persons Prohibition (APP) database lists people who can’t legally own weapons (as a consequence of criminal or mental health records) under state law. This addition would prevent people on the list from living in a house that has a gun.

9. Cracking down on people who can’t own guns legally but do anyway. Currently, 19,700 people who are on the APP list own guns. Police estimate that these people own roughly 39,000 firearms. This new law would authorize additional funding to enforce the law in this area.

10. Required safety training for handgun owners. People with concealed carry permits are required under California (and many other) state laws to pass a mandatory safety and firearm instruction course. This provision would require all handgun owners, regardless of permit status, to undergo a similar process.

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LGBT

BREAKING: Colorado Senate Approves Civil Unions Legislation

By Zack Ford on Feb 8, 2013 at 2:28 pm

Civil unions sponsor Sen. Pat Steadman (D) speaking before supporters in May 2012.

Just now, the Colorado Senate voted 21-14 to approve Senate Bill 11, which would create civil unions for same-sex couples. This was the second of two readings, with a final vote expected on Monday. During the debate, several Republicans attempted to add various amendments that would create special religious protections for adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples, but none of them passed. Denver area political reporter Eli Stokols pointed out that last year’s civil unions bill had such protections, but House Republicans went out of their way to block that bill from passing.

The bill is expected to advance quickly through the House this year. Not only did Democrats win control over the House, but they also elected openly gay Representative Mark Ferrandino (D), the bill’s sponsor, as Speaker of the House. A November poll found that 70 percent of Coloradans support legal recognition for same-sex couples.

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Alyssa

Hey Fairfax County, High School Seniors Can Handle ‘Beloved,’ And Learn About Racism and Sexism

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 8, 2013 at 2:04 pm

Laura Murphy, whose son is a senior in high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, doesn’t think he—or anyone else—should be reading Beloved in their English classes, and she’s on a quest to get it bumped from the curriculum. Per Raw Story:

“I’m not some crazy book burner,” Murphy, a mother of four, insisted to the Post. “I have great respect and admiration for our Fairfax County educators. The school system is second to none. But I disagree with the administration at a policy level.”

In spite of the awards and accolades won by Beloved and its author, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Murphy feels that the book’s theme of the brutality of slavery and scenes depicting gang rape, infant murder and violence are too intense for high school seniors. She said her son had nightmares when he had to read the book for his senior English course.

“It’s not about the author or the awards,” said Murphy. “It’s about the content.” On Thursday, the Fairfax County School Board voted not to hear Murphy’s challenge to the book. She now plans to take her fight to the Virginia Board of Education.

The thing about sending your children to public school is that you’re consenting to give up a certain amount of control over what they’re exposed to, because one of the major points of public schools is to make sure students have a pre-established set of skills and cultural references in common. And that often means teaching children things that their parents don’t know, or giving them access to literature and history that their parents might not have at home, or frankly, might not want them to read or learn about. It also, on an emotional level, means letting your children come into contact with ideas and art that will expand their sense of the world.

An associated risk of that is that they might be upset by some of the things they learn about the world. Racism is frightening. So is sexual assault. But both of those things have happened in the United States, and for many people, continue to be major factors that affect their day-to-day life. And I think high school seniors, especially those who will be going off to colleges where they have much more sexual autonomy, and will be dealing with larger and more diverse peer groups, not only are old enough to understand the reality of those facts and to be confronted with the emotional impacts they have, but really ought to be confronted by them. I’m not a parent yet, but my understanding is that parenting is a balance between protecting children from things they genuinely don’t have the capacity to process—Wu-Tang may be for the children, but I’m not sure Toni Morrison is—and helping them process the difficult things they have the moral and emotional ability to confront, even if that involves hard work on your, and their parts.

If Murphy’s son is having nightmares about slavery and gang rape, that actually seems to suggest that he’s pretty attuned to the emotional horror of racial and sexual violence. Maybe, instead of trying to protect him from those feelings, she could find some way for him to channel them into productive anti-racist or anti-sexist work. That would be much better college prep (and resume-building) for him than trying to save him, and other seniors, from being upset. I doubt Murphy is going to have much luck with the Virginia Board of Education. And she’ll have much less with whatever institution of higher learning he heads off to.

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Economy

Clinton: America’s Debt Problems ‘Can’t Be Solved’ With Austerity

By Travis Waldron on Feb 8, 2013 at 2:00 pm

Former president Bill Clinton urged House Democrats to avoid the push for immediate austerity at a party retreat in Virginia today, pointing to Europe’s failed deficit-cutting experiment that has led to further economic malaise instead of prosperity.

The American economy, bolstered by a major stimulus bill in 2009, has slowly recovered from the Great Recession, but unemployment remains high and growth slower than it should be. The U.S. has already cut more than $2.5 trillion from future deficits, but with the automatic spending cuts brought about by the 2011 debt ceiling deal fast approaching, Clinton pushed Democrats to avoid calls for “conventional austerity measures”:

The debt problem can’t be solved right now by conventional austerity measures, and that’s why Paul Krugman is right when he keeps talking about all these — everybody that’s tried austerity in a time of no growth has wound up cutting revenues even more than they cut spending because you just get into the downward spiral and drag the country back into recession.

Watch:

European countries that have attempted to spur growth by rapidly reducing their deficits have failed to accomplish either goal and have instead driven their economies back into recession. The United Kingdom’s deficit has hardly gotten smaller despite its austerity efforts and the country is on the verge of a triple-dip recession. Greece and Spain both have unemployment rates above 25 percent. Even Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is on the brink of another recession. The Eurozone as a whole slipped back into recession in November and its unemployment rate is at record highs.

Still, politicians in the United States have failed to heed Europe’s warnings, pursuing deficit reduction instead of job growth. Republicans blocked the American Jobs Act, which economists estimated would have spurred growth and created more than a million jobs, and have instead pursued damaging budget cuts that would have the opposite effect even amid evidence that the original American push for stimulus worked better than the European approach.

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Immigration

How The GOP Would Make Undocumented Immigrants America’s Next Permanent Underclass

By Aviva Shen on Feb 8, 2013 at 1:58 pm

Conservatives in the House of Representatives are rejecting the growing bipartisan consensus for permitting undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship. Instead, one prominent negotiatior, Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-ID), suggested a legal status “compromise” that would keep 11 million immigrants in a probationary grey area for an indefinite period of time, unable to participate in the full rights of citizenship. As the Washington Post warned, this so-called compromise would establish “a permanent underclass of workers.”

Creating a second class of Americans is not only unsustainable, but also damages the so-called American dream of equality and justice for all — a point proven each time the US has used the law to exclude a group in its history.

Slavery and Reconstruction

After the founding of the nation, lawmakers stipulated that citizenship excluded free and enslaved Africans, who comprised roughly 20 percent of the entire American population in 1776. The Supreme Court reaffirmed in the infamous Dred Scott decision that slaves could not claim citizenship, as they were considered property by the law. After the abolition of slavery, the law’s silence left African Americans in a legal limbo that denied them the right to vote and set the foundation for widespread segregation and economic exploitation. Even after the 14th and 15th Amendments nominally granted them full citizenship rights, state laws instituting poll taxes and literacy tests, as well as segregation and anti-miscegenation laws, immobilized African Americans in a second class of citizenship.

The Mexican-American War

The Mexican-American War ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico ceded the land that is now the American Southwest. In return, all Mexicans living on that land were to be granted full US citizenship. However, Congress and the Supreme Court denied American citizenship to Pueblo Indians and black Mexicans, though both groups had previously enjoyed Mexican citizenship. Pueblo Indians’ right to vote was revoked until 1924. Black Mexicans in Texas were given the choice to either stay in Texas and become slaves or be deported back to Mexico, where slavery was outlawed. Meanwhile, the courts chipped away at the property protections entitled to Mexican landowners as US citizens. Many new Mexican Americans lost their family land to white American settlers, throwing them into poverty for generations. Of course, Pueblos and black Mexicans’ property rights were immediately nullified.

The Chinese Exclusion Act

After initially encouraging Chinese migrant workers to come to the US and work on the Transcontinental Railroad, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to halt all immigration from China. At that point, large communities of Chinese immigrants, mainly in California, were permanently excluded from US citizenship. The law also threw families in limbo, as Chinese men could neither bring their families to the US nor leave the country, as they would be barred from re-entry to the US. Amendments to the law extended the law blocking entry to all Asians regardless of their country of origin — even those born in the US. American-born Chinese who traveled abroad were blocked from returning to their homes in the US. These restrictions pulled families apart and ensured that Chinese American communities already established would stagnate for four decades.

Japanese Internment

Japanese Americans were singled out as enemies during World War II and ordered to relocate to internment camps for the duration of the war. Japanese immigrants were already blocked from becoming full citizens, as naturalization laws banned citizenship for non-white people. American citizens of Japanese descent, however, were not spared from the internment camps, where they endured abysmal, overcrowded conditions for 3 years. When they returned, most found their homes looted or sold and their jobs long gone.
Read more

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Health

Health Workers Gunned Down In Nigeria, Threatening Global Effort To Combat Polio

By Hayes Brown on Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 pm

Child receives polio vaccine in Nigeria

Several health workers administering vaccines were shot dead in Nigeria today, part of a spread in violence threatening the tantalizingly close eradication of polio.

While the exact number of those dead is unclear — estimates on the ground vary from as many as twelve to as few as nine — there is a consensus growing about the identity of the group behind the attack:

No one claimed responsibility but the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, which has condemned the use of western medicine, has been blamed for a spate of assaults on security forces in the city in recent weeks.

[...]
“Gunmen opened fire on a health centre in the Hotoro district, killing seven, while an attack on the Zaria Road area of the city claimed two lives,” said a police spokesman, Magaji Musa. “[The health workers] were working for the state government giving out polio vaccinations at the time of the attack.”

Boko Haram — which has referred to itself as the “Nigerian Taliban” — has been a thorn in the side of the Nigerian government for over a year now, launching attacks against government facilities and bombing multiple churches. Should they be behind today’s murders, it would be the first instance of their targeting health workers.

The attacks seem close in nature to a rash of killings that swept through Pakistan last month, killing over a dozen. Much as in that case, current reports indicate all of those killed in Nigeria on Friday were women. Unlike in Pakistan, however, there’s no CIA program to blame the workers for colluding with. Instead, the militants have blamed the vaccines for being a Western plot to sterilize young girls and causing AIDS, neither of which is remotely true.

Nigeria is one of the last remaining holdouts of polio on Earth, with only Pakistan and Afghanistan joining it in having regular significant outbreaks. In 2012, Nigeria had at least 121 cases of polio, by far the most in the world. Facilitating a drop in those numbers will require a near universal vaccination rate, one that is unlikely to occur with the threat of violence.

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Justice

Conspiracy Theorist Clings To Allegations Of 0.0034% Voter Fraud In One Ohio County

By Josh Israel on Feb 8, 2013 at 1:10 pm

Voter Suppression Advocate John Fund

In a National Review article Friday, voter fraud conspiracy theorist John Fund again attempted to mislead readers into thinking strict photo ID laws are necessary to prevent election stealing. But, in so doing, he inadvertently shows why these voter suppression laws are not needed.

Fund mocks voting rights advocates for correctly noting that Americans are more likely to be struck by lighting than to commit voter fraud:

Well, lightning is suddenly all over Cincinnati, Ohio. The Hamilton County Board of Elections is investigating 19 possible cases of alleged voter fraud that occurred when Ohio was a focal point of the 2012 presidential election. A total of 19 voters and nine witnesses are part of the probe.

Democrat Melowese Richardson has been an official poll worker for the last quarter century and registered thousands of people to vote last year. She candidly admitted to Cincinnati’s Channel 9 this week that she voted twice in the last election.

According to the Hamilton County Board of Elections, 564,429 voters are registered in jurisdiction. Even if every single one of those 19 alleged cases proved true, that would represent less than 0.0034 percent of the county’s voters.

In Richardson’s case, she told the television station that she had not intended to commit vote fraud and merely showed up to vote in-person as she was unsure her absentee ballot would arrive in time to be counted. The story notes that the elections board’s report “states poll workers should have updated the signature poll book by flagging ‘absentee voter’ next to the names of those who appeared on the list.”

Regardless of Richardson’s intent, however, the National Review’s bait and switch is obvious. Requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls would do absolutely nothing to prevent double voting like this — intentional or inadvertent. Richardson truthfully identified herself at the polls and voted in her own name. Fund attempts to lump all types of voter fraud in together, but does not identify a single one of the 19 alleged cases in which a voter committed in-person impersonation of another voter.

Furthermore, these cases show that the existing laws successfully catch those who vote twice. While she could not comment on the ongoing investigation, Hamilton County Deputy Director of Elections Sally J. Krisel told ThinkProgress that “Ohio has very clear laws about checking,” so if a voter is found to have cast an absentee ballot and attempts to vote in person, only one vote is counted. And, based on the Channel 9 report, the 19 questioned voters have been subpoenaed — meaning they will be prosecuted if they indeed committed voter fraud.

Fund snidely concludes: “But, of course, as you know there is no voter fraud. Pay no attention to that lightning coming out of Ohio.” While voter fraud does rarely exist, fighting these sorts of “lightning” with strict photo ID laws that disenfranchise legitimate voters is like banning orange juice to prevent jaywalking.

Update

An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed the number of actual voters in Hamilton County in the November elections.

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Education

How Segregated Gifted And Talented Programs Are Hurting America’s Poorest Students

By Guest Blogger on Feb 8, 2013 at 1:00 pm

This week, Catalyst Chicago, a publication focused on urban education, reported that smart students from poor neighborhoods in that city are less likely to test into gifted elementary schools. This follows on the heels of a New York Times article highlighting a similar trend in the Big Apple.

These stories cast a spotlight on a sad, but not new truth about gifted and talented programs across the nation: they’re segregated. According to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, White and Asian students make up nearly three-fourths of students enrolled in gifted and talented programs, while Hispanic and African-American students are disproportionately under-represented.

These segregated gifted and talented programs represent the glaringly unjust educational opportunities afforded to students across our nation, and they lead to wasted talent. As the National Society for the Gifted & Talented notes, the identification of gifted students is often arbitrary. In some places, these decisions are made before children enter elementary school, and what often gets a child into a program is not an objective measure, but the ability of parents to advocate for their childrens’ admission.

In these instances, gifted and talented programs could be considered a promoter of segregation; if a child’s parents do not define her as intellectually advanced, she may never be identified as such. In fact, the Gifted and Talented Center found that when parents fail to recognize a child’s gifts, teachers may overlook them as well.

Gifted education should be integrated into our whole education system. This is a theme I’ve written about before in a column about a book dedicated to gifted and talented high schools. Excellence and equity can, and must, be achieved simultaneously.

Our guest blogger is Kaitlin Pennington, an education policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.