a bird and a bottle

The fabulous Ms. Lindsay Beyerstein has taken a new job as a reporter for In These Times. Her first piece, up today, takes on the Democrats and their recent support for abstinence only funding. What do the Dems have to give up, she wonders, in order to secure the success of some of their other priorities? Here’s a snippet:

Even opponents of abstinence-only education might concede that a few extra million for abstinence education is a small price to pay for easing the passage of a very important domestic spending bill that contains a lot of spending that’s important to Democrats.

Yet, principle is at stake here. Few people realize that the CBAE program promulgates out-and-out quackery and barely disguised religious dogma. These programs don’t just encourage students to remain abstinent as teenagers. By law, they are required to teach “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity,” among many other stipulations. In other words, the program must teach that all sexual activity outside of marriage, even between consenting adults, violates some nebulous “expected standard.”

Go check out the whole thing here.

The mantra in the six weeks or so since the Supreme Court handed down its truly awful decision in Gonzaels v. Carhart has been that elections have consequences. After Gonzales, that phrase was used to wag fingers at all of those supposed social liberals who voted for Bush. The phrase has also been used to rub Republicans’ faces in the new Democratic congressional gains.

However it’s been used before, I am feeling today like it’s a bit of a silly phrase, lacking meaning. Why? Because a Democratic Congressman, David Obey of Wisconsin, is pushing for an increase in funding for abstinence only programs. Obey, who is part of the Democratic House leadership and the head of the House Appropriations Committee, is supporting an increase in Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) funding by $27 million — up to $150 million. CBAE is one of the many abstinence only programs that has been proven to be both ineffective and filled with lies. And yet, a Democratic leader in the House is throwing bad money after bad money in support of abstinence only programs.

I’m sure this is a political move on Obey’s part to placate some of te more conservative members of his home state. I get that politics is a game. But Obey shouldn’t roll the dice when young people’s lives are on the line.

SIECUS has an action alert. Got tell Pelosi and Obey what you think.

The UVVA. Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Laci & Conner’s Law. Sounds nice enough, right? We want to be able to punish people who commit violence against pregnant women, because we are concerned both about the heightened risks of violence against pregnant women and about doing as much as we can to ensure a healthy birth outcome.

If only it were that simple…UVVA’s, as many of you probably know, were imagined and implemented with a much more political and much more suspect purpose — to establish fetal personhood and support anti repro justice crusaders.

Want more evidence? Well, around the country, prosecutors have attempted to rely on UVVA’s to prosecute pregnant women for not ensuring a perfect birth outcome.

Last week, RH Reality Check’s Amie Newman took on the issue, in the context of Kansas’s new UVVA, which was signed into law by the state’s “pro-choice” governor, Kathleen Sebelius. And what’s funny about Kansas, and what makes the UVVA’s political purposes so blindingly clear, is that the state already had a law protecting pregnant women. Newman has more:

In fact, in Kansas, this law repeals statutes already on the books that criminalize injury inflicted upon a pregnant woman. Twelve years ago, Kansas enacted “Motherhood Protection” laws (K.S.A. 21-3440 and K.S.A. 21-3441) that, according to the reproductive justice advocacy organization ProKanDo, “recognize the particularly heinous nature of crimes against pregnant women by providing separate criminal charges for those who interrupt a pregnancy in the commission of a crime.” These laws were put into place over a decade ago as the result of anti-choice advocates who, at the time, desperately wanted a UVVA in Kansas. What they got instead were laws that heightened the consequences of intentionally harming pregnant women, recognizing the atrocious nature of this type of crime, without defining fetuses as full people.

Fast forward to 2007 when anti-choice advocates in Kansas were finally able to pass the full UVVA that mirrored their ideology while serving their political purposes. Kansas’ law, according to Julie Burkhardt, executive director of ProKanDo, “contains extreme language when talking about life beginning at fertilization or conception — similar to about fifteen other states’ UVV laws.” So what reason can there be for repealing legislation already in place that ensures that perpetrators of violence against pregnant women will be prosecuted uniquely for their crimes? And why did the law pass now — with a pro-choice Governor and five failed attempts in previous years? There may be many reasons; though none have anything to do with justice, protection or concern for the victims of violent crimes.

Some evidence that the UVVA is neither meant to really address violence against women nor effective at preventing such violence: as Newman notes, in none of the 30 states that have state UVVA laws has violence against pregnant women declined. Not only do the laws not help women, but they put women’s reproductive lives in to jeopardy:

Perhaps what is most disturbing about the steady stream of laws like these around the country is their insidiousness. Julie [Burkhardt, director of ProKanDo, a pro-choice political action committee in Kansas] says, “With this type of bill, anti-choice advocates are hitting the spectrum of women’s reproduction.” While many reproductive justice advocates have wondered for years how anti-choice activists could scream so loudly for the punishment of abortion providers while somehow absolving women who access the abortions, it is no longer a puzzle.

“There is a real disconnect — when people think of reproductive health we think about abortion because that’s the hot button issue. It drives voters. But it’s also good for everybody to look at laws like Kansas’ law - it doesn’t just hurt women who need abortions but hurts women who want to continue their pregnancies and be mothers,” Julie says. Women who get abortions are women who chose to become or are already mothers at different points in their lives. Laws like these punish women across the entire reproductive continuum.

So what next? When supposedly pro-choice governors are signing UVVAs into effect, can we really have hope that we can stop their passage? Well, I don’t know. And I’m not particularly optomistic, particularly since these laws appear to protect both women and fetuses, at least on their face. What will it take to get the message across about the perils of the UVVA? How many women will have to end up in jail and how many others will have to end up injured or worse?

Two unpleasant news items today: first, via Feministing, I learn that pregnancy discrimination is up. Then I head over to the NY Times and bump head-on into an article about the antis’ increasing reliance on the argument that abortion should be banned because it is bad for women.

And then it struck me: these two news developments are inextricably related.

Here’s what I mean: pregnancy discrimination is up because there is little government mandate not to discriminate against pregnant women. Sure, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act says that where Title VII applies (larger employers, usually), employers cannot discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, but that leaves a whole lot that’s not covered (smaller employers, cases where it’s not discrimination but requests for extra benefits related to pregnancy). The slight nod of acceptance regarding pregnancy discrimination — it’s still not considered unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy even if it is against federal law — links directly into the thinking underlying the Times article: women are not rational actors when their fertility is concerned, and pregnancy is the prime example of that.

In the case of the anti-abortion rhetoric, the thinking goes that women who are pregnant and who are considering abortions cannot fully understand the consequences of their actions for their own mental health or for their families (when the Supreme Court accepted this argument in its recent Gonzales v. Carhart decision, I threw up a little in my mouth). If the Supreme Court’s decision is any indication, that way of thinking, in all its condescending and backwards glory, seems to be gaining adherents. And it’s fed into by the pervasive notion in American culture that pregnant women are somehow less human…less intelligent, less able to make decisions. Why, if that’s the case, then it all but makes sense to discriminate against them at work!

See what I mean about those dots being connected?

It’s ridiculous that this law was (and is) considered “controversial.”

Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell today signed a bill that will require all licensed health care facilities to provide emergency contraception (EC) to victims of rape and other sexual assaults. The law, which will go into effect on October 1st of this year, mandates that healthcare providers offer accurate and objective information about EC and that they provide the drug upon request to any woman who has been assaulted.

Sounds good, right? Women who have been raped or sexually assaulted should not have to carry the child of their attacker against their will. Seems like common sense. Or simple human decency. Especially in a state where up to 40% of sexual assault victims report that they were not offered the drug.

But of course it’s not that simple. The Ms. Feminist Wire explains why:

Out of the state’s 31 hospitals, only the four Catholic hospitals objected to the bill. In order to appease concerns by Catholics who oppose distribution of contraception, the bill allows a third-party provider, such as a rape crisis nurse, to dispense the medicine. Catholic officials, however, are not satisfied with the provision; Archbishop Henry J. Mansell still objects to the distribution of EC on hospital grounds, the Hartford Courant reports.

The reason the church objects? Because, though the law requires a totally superfluous pregnancy test (since EC will not affect an already existing pregnancy), it does not mandate an ovulation test, which Catholic hospitals in the state currently require before dispensing EC.

I really can’t believe we’re still fighting about this. I can’t believe that the science has been twisted so far and that women are hated so much that we would deny rape victims a pill that could — if offered promptly — help prevent an unwanted pregnancy. But I should expect this at this point…it’s just another example of the ironically pro-abortion “pro-life” agenda. Culture of life my ass.

(Also at Feministe)

After waiting five years to exercise his first veto, President Bush is going veto crazy. Continuing in the backwards tradition of his first veto (of the stem cell bill), the President seems to only pick up his veto pen for laws that might actually do some good. Of course, there’s his veto the other day of the war spending bill. But that’s not it.

Cases in point: two current veto threats.

The first is Bush’s threatened (promised?) veto of the new hate crimes legislation. The bill would expand federal hate crimes protection to include gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. It’s headed for approval in Congress. But Bush has already got the cap off of his veto pen. Why, you might ask, would the President veto so common sense a bill? Here’s the reasoning:

The statement said state and local laws already covered the violence addressed in the legislation. “There has been no persuasive demonstration of any need to federalize such a potentially large range of violent crime enforcement,” the administration said.

It’s laughable, really. Apparently, this administration felt that abortion regulation — with the exception of its basic foundation, something generally left to the states — needed to be federalized. But providing added protection to citizens who are often part of “discrete and insular minorities”? Not so much.

Anyway. This brings me to veto #2. According to today’s NY Times, Bush has “warned’ of a veto over any legislation that would allow federal funding for “the destruction of human life.” Why the veto warning now? Because Congress is thinking about repealing the global gag rule, therefore allowing US funding of international organizations that discuss or provide abortions and ending US promotion of abstinence-or-die.

Of course, a White House mouthpiece said that this is not about veto power but about the president standing firmly behind his beliefs. Apparently the president’s conviction for protecting life ends at birth — at least if one is a woman, has a chronic illness like MS, is gay, or is trans. Excuse me while I go scratch out my eyes at the irony of all of this.

Seems that last week’s report that abstinence only “education” programs are totally ineffective has emboldened some of ab-only’s opponents.

Earlier this week, Salon’s Broadsheet reported that the ACLU (full disclosure: where I will work this summer), Advocates for Youth, and SIECUS, hot on the heels of last week’s report, have sent a letter to the director of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), warning him that if HHS doesn’t comply with federal law (which the groups claim abstinence only programs violate), they’ll file a lawsuit challenging the Federal abstinence programs. Salon tells us that the case would be based on:

evidence that 1) many federally funded abstinence-only programs are filled with medically inaccurate information about condoms, HIV and other sexual health issues and 2) the programs have not proved to be effective in preventing teens from having sex.

But it’s not only the advocacy groups that are getting on the case now. Even the NYT is getting in on the action, though they did bury their editorial in the little-read Saturday paper. In their Editorial this morning, the paper writes:

Reliance on abstinence-only sex education as the primary tool to reduce teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases — as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress — looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

I take issue with the fact that the Times is totally hedging here — these programs are not becoming “increasingly” foolish or indefensible. They always have been, but no one was willing to stick out their neck before this report came out and made support of abstinence only a losing game. I appreciate that the Times is helping make this an issue. But their “eh” language won’t help much.

The truth is, it’s on Congress now to defund these programs. Congress has been complicit in their expansion for too long (the Republican Congress, I might add). Now, led by Democrats and changing the priorities, this Congress needs to use the recent report as support for its decision to defund these programs and mandate real, comprehensive sex ed in all our schools.

Via WIMN’s Voices:

Yesterday, an explosive device was found at an Austin, TX women’s health clinic. A clinic that performs abortions, of course. The place was shut down, people evacuated, and even a portion of the highway roped off.

Oh, didn’t hear about it? Yeah, didn’t think so.

There’s a reason for that — the nonexistent (or trifling) media coverage of violence against women, particularly when such violence brushes up against politically touchy subjects like abortion.

With the exception of this short AP article (mainstream national media did cover the spree of abortion provider shootings in Buffalo, NY and bombings around the country in the 1990s. But that was ten years ago. One would particularly expect the news antennae to go up over this violence and attempted violence today, with the fear level ratcheted up and the 24-hr coverage of terrorism, war, and anything else violent or salacious.

So why is it that stories about violence against women and women’s health is being ignored? Is it the politics? Or just a sense that because we don’t make a big deal out of it, the news machine doesn’t have to?

WIMN’s Keely Savoie suggests that the lack of news media attention is harming all feminist causes, and making feminists who do make a stink seem like chicken littles (or worse, like the stereotypical shrill women’s libber). Zuzu posits that there’s a real, actual, danger in the MSM non-reaction to such violence, and that it was also reflected in the lack of action after the first shooting at Virginia.

I’m not sure that I buy these theories. But I am disturbed by the lack of national concern about such violence.

Today’s hypocrites of the day are…right wing anti-choicers.

Why? Well, for many reasons, but for one central one today.

Which is this: the wingnuts — the same people who supposedly care oh so much about child health — actually don’t. They care about how good being pro-”life” and pro-child sounds, but not actually about children and families.

Case in point: Mississippi. In Mississippi, where there is 1 abortion clinic in the whole state, and where the governor rode to power on promises of cutting funding for medicaid, infant mortality is on the rise. As the NY Times reported today, the infant mortality rate in Mississippi in 2005 was 11.4 (per thousand births) as compared to a national average of 6.9 and the previous years 9.7. When separated by race, the numbers are even starker: 17 deaths per thousand among Mississippi’s Blacks; around 6 among Whites.

Certainly, many factors can be said to contribute to this rise: obesity and other health problems of the mother being the most obvious. But the most central reason that infant mortality is on the rise in Mississippi and around the south is because medicaid cuts have made it exceedingly difficult for poor women to secure prenatal care.

The Times explains:

[S]ocial workers say that the motivation of poor women is not so simply described, and it can be affected by cuts in social programs and a dearth of transportation as well as low self esteem.

“If you didn’t have a car and had to go 60 miles to see a doctor, would you go very often?” said Ramona Beardain, director of Delta Health Partners. The group runs a federally financed program, Healthy Start, that sends social workers and nurses to counsel pregnant teenagers and new mothers in seven counties of the Delta. “If they’re in school they miss the day; if they’re working they don’t get paid,” Ms. Beardain said.

It’s not only the issue of transportation; in the last few years, changes in Medicaid requirements have made it much more onerous to enroll (and stay enrolled) — a ploy to get people off the state rolls at the expense of their health and that of their children.

In 2004, Gov. Haley Barbour came to office promising not to raise taxes and to cut Medicaid. Face-to-face meetings were required for annual re-enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, the children’s health insurance program; locations and hours for enrollment changed, and documentation requirements became more stringent.

As a result, the number of non-elderly people, mainly children, covered by the Medicaid and CHIP programs declined by 54,000 in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years. According to the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program in Jackson, some eligible pregnant women were deterred by the new procedures from enrolling.

One former Medicaid official, Maria Morris, who resigned last year as head of an office that informed the public about eligibility, said that under the Barbour administration, her program was severely curtailed.

“The philosophy was to reduce the rolls and our activities were contrary to that policy,” she said.

The result? fewer women receiving medicaid, more dead babies. Many people — even those who accept the anti-reproductive justice rhetoric — can see that this is bad policy:

Oleta Fitzgerald, southern regional director for the Children’s Defense Fund, said: “When you see drops in the welfare rolls, when you see drops in Medicaid and children’s insurance, you see a recipe for disaster. Somebody’s not eating, somebody’s not going to the doctor and unborn children suffer.”

But not Governor Haley Barbour, who spearheaded these changes, and who had this to say about his stance on abortion:

[I support] Protecting the rights of the unborn. I am pro-life. I have been a national spokesman on this issue and will continue to be an advocate for policies which promote the sanctity of human life.

Yep, he supports policies that protect “the sanctity of human life” alright. But only, that is, until a child is born.

No sooner had I apologized for focusing so much on criminal justice recently, did the Supreme Court drop the Gonzales ruling on us, and this blog became all feminist talk all the time. Today I’m getting back to our regularly scheduled programming, though I’ll write more about the federal abortion ban as articles surface.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about poverty. Specifically, why it is that we talk so little about it in an incredibly wealthy country with staggering numbers of people living in poverty. Part of it is certainly a strange American “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. I say strange because that mentality fails to take into account the myriad reasons that people may not have bootstraps — or the strength or resources with which to use them.

There’s also the racism that is inextricable from poverty in the U.S. — too big a topic to explore in a quick pre-study group blog post. But there’s another reason we don’t talk about poverty — because more and more it’s seen as a women’s issue, and not one that large national groups are taking up.

Turns out, according to an article in AlterNet yesterday, that 70% of those living in poverty around the world are women. Most of these women are caregivers, whose work has been estimated to be worth $100,000/year each. But of course, they’re not paid. As a result of this, in the U.S. at least, women over 65 are twice as likely to live in poverty as men in the same age range.

Poverty is not only limited to older women. According to UNFPA:

Worldwide, women on average earn slightly more than 50 per cent of what men are earning. Poverty is particularly destructive of women’s health, especially their reproductive and sexual health: women and girls are often the last to eat; women’s health problems are considered less important than other family priorities; girls may be sold into prostitution; and mothers sometimes are forced to sell their bodies just to be able to feed their children.

Though the UNFPA report focuses on third world countries, the same language could be used to describe the situation in the U.S.; perhaps in the U.S. the problem should be considered worse. The government here has the money to do something about poverty and about the number of women and children living in it. But they don’t. Instead, they turn a blind eye, and speak in grand generalizations that sound humane but are both hollow and notable in what they don’t include. Justice Kennedy’s wrongheaded decision in Gonzales on Wednesday included this little snippet:

The government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman. A central premise of the opinion was that the Court’s precedents after Roe had “undervalue[d] the State’s interest in potential life.” 505 U. S., at 873 (plurality opinion); see also id., at 871. The plurality opinion indicated “[t]he fact that a law which serves a valid purpose, one not designed to strike at the right itself, has the incidental effect of making it more difficult or more expensive to procure an abortion cannot be enough to invalidate it.” Id., at 874. This was not an idle assertion. The three premises of Casey must coexist. See id., at 846 (opinion of the Court). The third premise, that the State, from the inception of the pregnancy, maintains its own regulatory interest in protecting the life of the fetus that may become a child, cannot be set at naught by interpreting Casey’s requirement of a health exception so it becomes tantamount to allowing a doctor to choose the abortion method he or she might prefer.

This passage, like so many others in the decision, pays lip service to the Court’s respect for — indeed, protection of — life. But, also like the rest of the opinion, it’s not women’s lives with which the Court is concerned. Do you see where I am going with this? We live in a country that is proud of its so-called culture of life. But in the hierarchy of whose lives matter, women continue to fall at the bottom. The Supreme Court’s decision this week was the most recent - and perhaps most disturbing - example of this. The fact that poverty persists at such levels even as it continue to become a women’s problem (or perhaps particularly so) is another stark reminder of the little respect US lawmakers have for women and for women’s health.

In addition to Lynn’s article, to which I linked below, I wanted to direct your attention to some other great commentaries about the abortion ban from around the blogosphere:

Law prof Jack Balkin makes it clear (as if it weren’t already) why this matters: It’s the informed consent, stupid.

Lynn Harris of Salon also thinks through the implications of the decision in her recap.

Terrance at The Republic of T (via Jill) talks about what it means to be able to choose whether or not to terminate a second trimester pregnancy, and reminds us about the ramifications when choices are taken away from women.

Feminist Law Prof David S. Cohen reminds us who really gets hurt in all this – poor women.

belledame’s got the newest Carnival of the Feminists in 3 parts, and of course pulls together many posts about yesterday’s decision.

[edited] former Planned Parenthood chief Gloria Feldt unleashes her wisdom at WIMN’s voices, explaining why Gonzales is a Partial Truth Decision.

More of my own analysis to come…when I finish my evidence outline.

The amazing Lynn Paltrow (a mentor and friend of mine), founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, has cranked out a strong rebuke to the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday. It’s up at The American Prospect. Here’s an except. But go read it all.

And yet the Bush administration is actively supporting policies to limit poor children’s access to state child health insurance programs. In short, the Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart — and Bush’s professed support for it — reinforces the sense, once again, that only the unborn deserve protection in this country. Not by ensuring universal health care, paid maternity leave, or an end to workplace pregnancy discrimination — only by restricting pregnant women’s access to health care.

One of the most common comments I’ve seen around the blogosphere (sometimes from trolls, sometimes not) since yesterday’s ruling is that the decision doesn’t matter — that it only affects one procedure which is performed very infrequently. As I noted in a post yesterday, the decision matters a lot. In large part, its impact will come from the fact that it sanctions abortion restrictions that don’t have an exception for women’s health.

Another big reason (or rather, several reasons) this case matters is (are) clear in today’s L.A. Times article, aptly titled “Anti-abortion activists Look to Build on Court Victory“. Based on an interview with Operation Rescue’s head (OR is Randall Terry’s baby), the article is a bullet-point list of the wingnut anti-choicers’ plans in the wake of Gonzales v. Carhart:

– Ban all abortion of viable fetuses, unless the mother’s life is endangered.

– Ban mid- and late-term abortion for fetal abnormality, such as Down syndrome or a malformed brain.

– Require doctors to tell patients in explicit detail what the abortion will involve, show them ultrasound images of the fetus and warn them that they might become suicidal after the procedure.

– Lengthen waiting periods so women must reflect on such counseling for several days before obtaining the abortion.

It is far from certain that the Supreme Court would uphold all these proposals. But anti-abortion activists clearly feel momentum is on their side.

In particular, they’re pleased that the court upheld an outright ban — with no exceptions — on a surgical procedure performed in the second trimester, when the fetus is too large to be evacuated through a suction tube.

Still think Gonzales was an unimportant blip?

(via Scott)

update 2: Today’s decision brings to bear the real - and devastating - impacts of Justice O’Connor’s retirement.

—

update: At least Ginsburg’s got some brains:

Ginsburg, in a lengthy statement, said “the Court’s opinion tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.” She said the federal ban “and the Court’s defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court — and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women;s lives. A decision of the character the Court makes today should not have staying power.”

——–

The decision is in. The Supreme Court today upheld the late-term abortion ban Congress passed after the Court struck down a similar ban a few years ago. Congress, if you remember, passed the bill after making findings that a late term (aka partial birth) abortion was never medically necessary. Which is BS. Of course. Anyone with half a brain knows that.

But apparently not Justice Kennedy, who provided the crucial fifth vote to uphold the ban and who wrote the friggin’ majority opinion. Given that he’s now the swing vote on the court (since O’Connor stepped down), this does not bode well for women’s rights under the Roberts SCOTUS.

Kennedy wrote in the opinion that the opponents of the act ”have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases.” Which makes little sense to me at first blush. Just because in the majority of cases a law is not unconstitutional as applied means that it does violate the rights of some. Backwards logic if I ever saw it — a failed attempt to justify an obviously political decision that is bound to do damage to the Constitution.

Texas State Rep. Warren Chisum is at it again. Yes, that Warren Chisum. The one who wanted to pass a law banning the teaching of evolution in Texas schools. The one lambasted by the late great Molly Ivins in her Dildo Diaries video.

This time, the man who wants to fight for a Christian Texas is doing it pretty overtly. The LA Times reported yesterday that he has proposed a bill that would require all public high schools to offer an elective course on the Bible. The course would teach the “history and literature of the Old and New Testaments eras.”

There’s so much wrong with this bill it’s hard to figure out where to start. Here’s the obvious. In many many (many) places in Texas, a class that teaches the Bible will not be teaching it as literature, but rather as a holy document and the word of God. Though Chisum says that won’t be so (he said the course would not treat the Bible as a “worship document” but would promote religious and cultural literacy by “educating our students academically and not devotionally.”), I’m not quite so sure.

Think about it. Especially given the funding structure of the bill. Who would be the teachers?

The bill, which says the class is to be taught in “an objective and nondevotional manner,” does not provide funding or training for school districts and teachers. [...]

“The fear is that teachers with limited training and no guidance will be called upon to teach a course for which their experience draws largely from Sunday school,” Miller said. “It would be difficult for them to keep their own religious perspective out of the classroom. You can almost hear the lawyers lining up.”

That fear is well-founded. There are already studies proving that religion has a tendency to creep in in situations like the one this bill would create:

A study conducted for her group by Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, found that of Texas’ 25 public school districts with a Bible course, 22 districts’ offerings had a Christian slant.

“When teachers don’t have solid training in biblical studies and 1st Amendment issues, then they fall back on what they know from prior knowledge,” Chancey told state legislators last week. “Courses end up being sectarian, often despite their best intentions.”

He said one teacher showed students a PowerPoint presentation titled “God’s Road Map for Your Life.” Included was a slide called “Jesus Christ Is the One and Only Way.” Another teacher taught students that NASA had found a missing day and time that corresponded to a biblical story of the sun standing still. One school showed “VeggieTales” videos, which feature computer-animated Christian vegetables that talk.

That’s right, folks. Talking Christian vegetables. Of course, the bill also raises serious First Amendment concerns. While Chisum promises that it will not teach religious doctrine (and I am all for teaching the Bible as Literature), it’s hard to see how the bill would not require state funding for religious (as opposed to literary) education. Especially given the empirical studies quoted above.

And it’s not hard to see that that’s exactly the situation Chisum wants:

Chisum’s legislation says the Bible would be the primary textbook for the class. It allows but doesn’t require the classes to include secular books or those from other religions.

Seems to me that teaching the Bible as history and literature, you might want to bring in, oh, i don’t know, a history text. Or perhaps novels or memoirs that illustrate how authors have used or criticized the bible in their writing.

There are other problems with the bill, including the fact that in many Texas schools there isn’t even funding for music education or gym. Is Bible studies the thing that should get the precious few education dollars?

Warren Chisum would say yes. Because to him, religious ideology trumps all. As I said in my post the other day about states turning down abstinence-only funding, to guys like Chisum, school is for preaching, not for teaching.

(also at LG&M)