Another Day, Another Nut-Case In Texas

McClatchy:

An Arlington lawmaker has filed a bill aimed at protecting Texas college professors and students from discrimination because they question evolution. 

The measure from Republican state Rep. Bill Zedler would block higher education institutions from discriminating against or penalizing teachers or students based on their research into intelligent design or other theories that disagree with evolution.

Zedler said he filed the bill because of cases in which colleges had been hostile to those who believe that certain features of life-forms are so complex that they must have originated from a higher power. 

"We can have the academic freedom to have all kinds of ideas and philosophies but, lo and behold, even mention intelligent design and there are people that want to run you out of town on a rail," Zedler said.

...

If the bastards try to cram antiscientific religious claptrap down my (hypothetical) kid's throat in a publicly funded school, soon enough they'll wish it was only a rail they were being run out of town on...

There are two obligations government-funded public schools must address:

• From an ethical standpoint, they are obliged to teach any scientific matter on the basis of best available research in any specific subject. Otherwise, what they teach is either not science, or it's not honest. Creationism is religious dogma, pure and simple. It is an ethical violation to teach any flavor of it in the public schools, first and foremost because it isn't science, and second because it is dishonestly presented as science.
  
  
• From a constitutional standpoint, public institutions must not serve as conduits for instruction in any religion (or no religion at all). You can't teach Christianity... or atheism... in the public schools in America. There are religion-based schools affiliated with most churches where one may do exactly that... but not on the taxpayers' dime.
  
  

I am unwilling to compromise either obligation of the public schools, and I wish my former political party would take a stand on the issue. There are occasionally difficult cases regarding church-and-state issues, but most of them aren't hard at all. And you know where our nation's founders stood on the matter.

H/T Blue Texan.