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To: WildHorseCrash
Ken Ham, and any parent who inculcates such ignorance in children should be locked up.

That's a little extreme, IMO. Actively exposed as frauds and berated, yes, but locked up? As fired up as this perpetuation of ignorance makes me, I still believe the 1st Amendment guarantees one's right to be willfully ignorant, and if one wants to raise his/her kids that way, it's not the government's place to interfere. (That would be a very slippery slope to walk on...)

Now, on the other hand, if a parent unwittingly paid Ken Ham to educate their kid in science, they might have a good case for a class-action lawsuit for parents to get a full refund on their investment...

153 posted on 03/23/2006 6:56:57 AM PST by Quark2005 (Confidence follows from consilience.)
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To: Quark2005
That's a little extreme, IMO. Actively exposed as frauds and berated, yes, but locked up?

LOL, okay, so it's not a fully thought-out policy proposal. But, I don't have a problem if a parent says, "Here's what the science is, but we don't want to believe it because we find it religiously threatening grounds," and someone who just lies about what the science is ("science proves Noah's flood happened" and so forth) or who (like the Ham-ster, here) teach their children to be ignorant. I think that's the part that gets me. They are basically saying "don't learn this, make yourself ignorant." Anyone who does that has no business being a parent. Locking them up may be a bit extreme, but not by much, IMO.

165 posted on 03/23/2006 7:16:24 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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To: Quark2005; WildHorseCrash
Now, on the other hand, if a parent unwittingly paid Ken Ham to educate their kid in science...

In other threads I've suggested that the Dover case would had been better fought in state court, on fraud charges, and in the PA Legislature, on high crimes and misdemeanors.

Specifically, claiming that ID is science is a fraud upon the students. The taxpayers paid to get a science education, and instead they're getting pseudoscience.

I'm assuming that PA is like VA, in that the Legislature has passed laws mandating the formation of school boards, and mandating that these boards draw up curricula. By including pseudoscience in the science curriculum, these elected officials are violating the requirements of their office. That's the definition of high crimes.

The advantage of this approach is that applies to subjects that have no establishment clause entanglement, like Ebonics-as-Engllish, or Afrocentrism-as-History.

176 posted on 03/23/2006 9:12:11 AM PST by Virginia-American
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