… In public schools. According to one Federal Judge in the US, not much.
A Mission Viejo high school history teacher violated the First Amendment by disparaging Christians during a classroom lecture, a federal judge ruled today.
James Corbett, a 20-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, referred to Creationism as “religious, superstitious nonsense” during a 2007 classroom lecture, denigrating his former Advanced Placement European history student, Chad Farnan.
The decision is the culmination of a 16-month legal battle between Corbett and Farnan – a conflict the judge said should remind teachers of their legal “boundaries” as public school employees.
In some ways, this ruling is correct, in my view, according to the current law. Statements about religion in a public high school classroom in a class that is not about religion can be taken a lot of ways by students, and given the authority enriched position of a teacher, almost always risk violating the establishment clause one way or another. This is why teachers are advised to make different kinds of claims, such as “Your question, Little Timmy, is about religion. This is a science class. Take your question elsewhere please.” … And after Little Timmy has asked the same religiously oriented question (related to Evolution) the third or fourh time, “Timmy, I asked you to stop disrupting the class in this manner, go to the office.”
On the other hand, if a question about evolution is legitimately raised in a science classroom, which can happen a number of different ways, a teacher may have the responsibility at some point to say that the scientific view is valid and the religious view is not. If the source of the conflict is not the teacher (is not in the curriculum) and is not merely a discipline issue (a student disrupting the class by handing out bible pages) then a direct retort may be valid, in my view.
But maybe not in this legal framework.
This brings up another question which to me is very disconcerting. Do these rules (the ones we are speaking of here as well as other case law regarding teaching science) apply to public colleges? Personally, I do not see the distinction between public high schools and colleges in many of these rulings. I find it fascinating that this has not come up as an issue. Yet.
In the case in question:
“Corbett states an unequivocal belief that Creationism is ‘superstitious nonsense,'” U.S. District Court Judge James Selna said in a 37-page ruling released from his Santa Ana courtroom. “The court cannot discern a legitimate secular purpose in this statement, even when considered in context.”
There clearly is a weaknessin the ruling here, and I think we can refer to Dover for this. The teacher is making te case that Creationism is not valid science. Perhaps the teacher used strong words to say it, but that is not the issue here. The teacher is technically correct. So, the court has suppressed a valid statement of truth in favor of a subjective opinion. That may be how this decision goes away at some higher level.
[source of the story]
This is being discussed here.
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Greg:
No, he’s saying it’s superstitious nonsense. That’s much, much harsher. The aether theory and Lamarckianism weren’t valid science, but neither were they superstitious nonsense; the two phrases are not equal or equivalent.
Greg:
YES IT IS! It’s precisely the point, it’s the strong words that the judge ruled against. In the next sentence of the judgement the judge wrote:
He’s not saying the teacher should not be expressing disapproval of religion when working as a teacher in a public school. Don’t like that? Change the law.
Greg:
True, but irrelevant in this case. If a teacher said in class that a student’s mother was a smelly ten dollar whore, that would be a different improper behavior from the teacher. Correctness is important, but it is rarely the whole story – the world is more complex than that!
Greg:
No, they’ve ruled that a class in a public school is not an appropriate situation for a teacher to air such views. It has said “not there, not then”.
I do find it discouraging that science bloggers exploiting the tired tactics of religious folks in misrepresenting events to force them to fit with their prejudices. Isn’t a scientific approach supposed to include honesty and research?
This judge was well aware of what he was ruling, unlike bloggers who can’t be bothered to go to the original ruling but provide knee-jerk responses to their biased mis-readings of a press report. Look at the afterword of the judgement; the judge wrote:
Whether you agree with that statement is not the point; the point is that it demonstrates that the judge is well aware of the issues. His ruling is not about the correctness or not of creationism or about teaching it; his ruling is that the US Constitution mandates that religion is kept out of public schools, and that keeping religion out also means keeping anti-religious sentiment out too, which seems fair.
Just to be clear: yes, creationism is superstitious nonsense (as is all religion), no I don’t think this should have gone to a court.
Honesty is a great asset; science wastes it at its peril.
Sam, first, you need to rewrite this sentence: He’s not saying the teacher should not be expressing disapproval of religion when working as a teacher in a public school. Don’t like that? Change the law.
Beyond that you make valid valid points that I mostly agree with but did not touch on.
I don’t agree automatically that calling religion superstition is incorrect or inappropriately offensive. But it may well be taken that way.
That the ruling does not take into account the incorrectness of creationism is precisely the problem and why it is a bad ruling, and why it may be thrown out in reference to Dover.
If the teacher had said…
” Satanism is religious, superstitious nonsense”
Would the ruling have been the same?
I don’t think so.
It’s a tough case, and I think the judge had a very fine line to tread. It seems to have come down to a single comment. From the court’s final order:
The problem I have with this is whether he called creationism or religion. Creationism ≠ religion, and vice versa. Since the court says that this is “improper disapproval of religion”, they are plainly stating that they think creationism equals religion. Look closely at what Mr. Corbett said: that creationism is religious, and that creationism is superstitious nonsense. He did not say that religion is superstitious nonsense. If I say “This apple is tasty, red fruit.” am I implying that anything tasty is thereby red fruit?
I think the appropriate legal precedent would be Edwards v. Aguillard. The only new thing about Dover was the “Intelligent Design” repackaging, and Dover is not a binding precedent outside of central Pennsylvania. Edwards v. Aguillard, which determined that Creation Science is religion, and is not science, is a binding national precedent since 1987 by virtue of having made it to the Supreme Court.
It strikes me as odd that religious objections can be brought up in the classroom by students, but to address them is illegal. If the facts are on the side of an individual, I see no problem with speaking the truth under ANY circumstances so long as it is not selective facts which give false impressions or cause misunderstandings.
“superstitious nonsense”
I think the problem here is with the nonsense. Superstitions make a lot of sense to the people who believe in them, so the phrase was not even correct. If the teacher had said:
“superstitious notions for which there no shred of scientific evidence” I think he may have been in the clear.
Virgil: I think you arecorrect regarding E v A. What i was thinking specifically was the Dover element that id’ed ID as creationism (and then went on to rely on E v A to link ID to religion and thus the disclaimer as violating the First Amendment).
Religion IS superstitious nonsense. There is no evidence that it has any basis in reality.
Sailor: Superstition IS nonsense, from Wikipedia:
No, the court specifically found that Corbett’s statement about creationism that:
… was not a violation of the establishment clause. The problem was that calling it “religious, superstitious nonsense” is disapproval of its status specifically as a religious belief. A government employee cannot do that under the First amendment.
Creationism is nonsense. It is literally non science. So what’s the problem when a teacher states the truth which may hurt little Timmy’s world view?
By the way, Corbett is a history teacher not a science teacher. The title of this article might lead one to believe he is a science teacher. Not that this may really make much difference.
I have heard some clips with some of Corbetts other comments. The one comment could be taken with a grain of salt, he did happen to have several other inflammatory anti-religous comments not related to creationism.
I saw some of the other comments in the article. The judge seems to have zeroed in on the most innocuous comment, and the one that, with good legal assistance, may have a decent chance of being overturned in appeals.
Yes, that’s true. But the teacher whose comments that he was addressing, John Peloza, is a science teacher. Essentially, a science teacher voided the whole scientific enterprise and violated the Establishment Clause and a history teacher called him on it (read: knows more about the subject than the science teacher) – albeit somewhat harshly – and the only one in violation of the Establishment Clause is the guy telling the truth?
Nope, sorry. If Peloza isn’t in trouble for teaching creationism in science then the Establishment Clause is useless.