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A Binghamton University historian argues in a new book that Americans are not divided when it comes to the teaching of evolution: The real disagreements relate to creationism.

I dont want to make anyone an atheist, says Adam Laats, a professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership at Binghamton. No public school should have that as its goal, just like no public school should be trying to teach kids any religious idea, which would include creationism.

Laats new book, Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution, was published in October by Oxford University Press.

Creationism is a private issue, and most Americans are some kind of creationists, Laats says. Most Americans have some sort of belief that, you know, all this didnt just happen.

A Gallup poll last year found that 40% of American adults believe God created humankind within the past 10,000 years. Another third of those polled said humans evolved over millions of years with Gods guidance. Just 22% said they thought humans evolved without any divine intervention.

Most people who are creationists want their kids to learn evolution in schools, Laats says. Its not a problem.

The problem arises when people insist that their particular religious beliefs form part of the curriculum. Laats sees two key characteristics of what he terms radical creationism.

The first is that it disputes the legitimacy of mainstream science. Radical creationists say mainstream science is entirely wrong, he says. Evolutionary science cant be right.

The other part is that radical creationists try to impose their beliefs into the public square. That includes public schools, but also questions such as: Should there be a prayer before a public meeting? Should people say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays?

A former middle school and high school teacher, Laats says researching this book helped him understand certain anti-science attitudes present in the country today.

The 2020 political moment, this crisis-fueled moment, has parallels in the history of creationism, he says. Understanding that history helps people understand how it is possible that some large number of Americans have confidence in these statements that seem, to me, patently false.

Laats says theres a pattern going back to the 1960s of aggressively dissident, competing science that today is expressed when someone labels facts as fake news. Its not that someone like Scott Atlas, a physician and advisor to the White House coronavirus taskforce, hasnt heard what epidemiologists are saying about the pandemic. Its that they dispute the legitimacy of the people with whom they disagree, Laats says. And were experiencing an acute outbreak at the very top. Its very easy for people to dismiss what seem like they might be obvious in-your-face truths if you dismiss the source of those ideas.

Although debates surrounding creationism have certain elements in common with controversies about climate science, Laats says its not a fair comparison.

They get lumped together because theyre the two most prominent science denialism issues out there, he says, but they actually have both different histories and different trajectories. Climate change denialism is a lot more like tobacco science.

Large, well-funded tobacco companies paid to have scientists go over peer-reviewed reports in the 1950s and 60s and issue statements highlighting the limitations of findings about the dangers of smoking. Some people who cast doubt on climate science have similar financial motivations, Laats says.

Its a deliberate, well-funded, intentional, cynical attempt to spread ignorance, or at least doubt about established science, he says.

The creationism debate isnt rooted in money, for the most part.

For science educators, this has been an issue for 50 years. And for many of them, it feels outlandish, Laats says. How can there be a debate? Its not a debate. Theres science. And then theres this other thing.

Hes optimistic that American schools will continue to teach mainstream scientific principles related to evolution. Even the most ardent anti-evolution groups, like Answers in Genesis, want their kids to learn evolution, Laats says. They just dont trust people like me to teach it to their kids. They dont want their kids to learn from people that they dont trust, including secular, politically liberal, union-member types. So its not evolutionary theory anymore that they actually have a beef with their children learning, even though they think its incorrect.

From a public policy perspective, that needs to be the end of the discussion, he says, even if some people view that as accommodating science deniers. Lets stop fighting, he says. Lets agree to stop talking right there because the rest of it isnt our business. The rest of it is culture war talk. The way that I think of it is that Americans dont disagree about evolution. We just dont like each other. Or maybe a more polite way to say it is we dont trust each other.

Laats is the author of three other books about the history of American education: Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education; The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education and Fundamentalism; and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of Americas Culture Wars. He earned a doctorate in U.S. history at the University of WisconsinMadison in 2007. His next project focuses on the first systematic attempt at urban school reform in the United States.

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Book traces disputes over teaching evolution - Binghamton University Research News - Insights and Innovations

As Republicans ram through Trumps third Supreme Court nomination with an election underway, Democrats are increasingly contemplating expanding the court. But rather than cover it with the objectivity they claim to strive for, the countrys dominant media outlets have adopted a right-wing frame of the issuecalling it court packingthat delegitimizes court expansion.

New York Times (9/19/20): Democrats call expanding the court a defensive move, while Republicans call it radical and undemocratic.

Ruth Bader Ginsburgs Death Revives Talk of Court Packing, announced a New York Times headline (9/19/20). What Is Court Packing, and Why Are Some Democrats Seriously Considering It? asked the Washington Post (10/8/20). In that piece, the Posts Amber Phillips explicitly acknowledged the bias inherent in the phrase, yet presented it as practically official:

Expanding the Supreme Court to more than nine seats sounds like a radical idea, and the term for it, court packing, sounds derisive because it has created controversy every time it has come up.

In typical corporate media style, such articles often present the issue as a he said/she said dispute. In the WaPo piece, Democrats are frustrated that the Supreme Court could get even more conservative, while Republicans paint that as sour grapes; over at the Times, Democrats characterize court expansion as a defensive move against Republican actions, not a unilateral power grab, while Republicans have called the idea radical and undemocratic.

In these formulations, one side must win and the other lose. But the reality they gloss over is that those arent the real teams here. The struggle over the Court is at heart a struggle between anti-democratic forces and the interests of the vast majority of people in this country.

In recent years, massive amounts of corporate money have been directed toward efforts, led by the right-wing Federalist Society, to capture the US courts for corporate interestsdismantling voting rights, favoring corporate rights over individual rights, and stripping the power of government to regulate corporations (CounterSpin, 10/16/20). By framing the issue as one of Republicans vs. Democrats, media ignore the more important threat to democracy as a whole. And by accepting court packing as the term for expanding the court, journalists lend a hand to those anti-democratic forces.

The phrase court packing isnt new. President Franklin D. Roosevelts opponents coined it to delegitimize his plan to expand the court after it repeatedly struck down parts of his New Deal in the name of restraining government power (federal andin some cases, like the courts rejection of New Yorks effort to set a minimum wage for womenstate). In the end, FDRs plan languished in the Senate, but the president won the war; in the wake of his public campaign against it, the court began issuing rulings more favorable to the New Deal and other economic recovery plans. One of the conservative justices retired, giving FDR the opportunity to swing the balance back in his favorno thanks to the media, which ran predominantly unfavorable stories about FDRs plan.

The circumstances are different this time around, with Republicans on the verge of installing a 63 conservative majority, and none of the conservative seats likely to open under a Biden term; the oldest conservative justice, Clarence Thomas, is just 72, and hasnt given any indication that hes interested in retiring. Plus, its unlikely Biden would push forcefully for a court expansion the way FDR did, putting pressure on the court to temper its rulings. But the rampant journalistic use of the biased term court packing hasnt changed.

A Nexis search of US newspapers for the past three months (7/24/2010/24/20) turns up 244 headlines with some version of the phrase court packing (including, e.g., pack the court or packing the court). Less than half as many, 98, used a version of the more neutral court expansion (such as expanding the court), and almost half of those (48) also used the phrase court packing within the article.

Its also noteworthy what that these court packing stories highlightand ignore. In arguments about court expansion, the right tends to focus on ideas of tradition (like the false claim that adding justices would be unprecedented) and the culture wars (like Roe v. Wade). Democrats often lean on the Republican hypocrisy of blocking Obamas nomination of Merrick Garland to fill Antonin Scalias seat in 2016, when the GOP insisted, eight months before an election, that the voters should have a chance to weigh in before a new justice was confirmeda principle instantly abandoned when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died seven weeks before an election.

The role of corporate money and the Federalist Society, and the threats they pose to democracy, often go unmentioned by both sides. In the last three months, newspaper stories that mentioned court packing also mentioned Merrick Garland 358 times and abortion 337 times; Roe v. Wade made 159 appearances. But these stories mentioned the Federalist Society only 33 times; of those, only seven mentioned corporate or corporation.

Abraham Lincoln (quoted in Jacobin, 9/19/20): If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.

In the end, its unlikely that even ifand its a big ifDemocrats take the presidency and the Senate, there will be enough agreement within the party to expand the Supreme Court. But thats also not the only way to counter the corporate takeover of the court. In the face of an intransigent pro-slavery court, Lincoln and his anti-slavery allies recognized that their most powerful and effective strategy was not to try to add enough justices to gain the upper hand within the court; it was to undermine the false image of an impartial, democracy-protecting court that must always have the last word. As Matt Karp writes in Jacobin (9/19/20):

Lincoln persisted in rejecting judicial supremacy and also the basic idea underlying it, that law somehow exists before or beyond politics, and thus it was illegitimate to resist the proslavery court through popular antislavery mobilization. We do not propose to be bound by [Dred Scott] as a political rule, he said. We propose resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.

Others have advocated for a similar approach today: marginalizing rather than trying to capture the court (e.g., New Republic, 10/13/20). Neither task would be easy, but getting journalists to talk more directly about the true problems with the court is a critical step along the way.

Featured image: Anti-FDR cartoon from the Waterbury Republican (2/14/1937).

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Journalists Pick Sides When They Call Adding Justices 'Court Packing' - FAIR

Many charity professionals, including a former board member of the Charity Commission, have hit out at the sectors regulator after it mooted a possible inquiry into the purpose of the National Trust.

The Telegraph newspaper reported over the weekend that current chair, Baroness Stowell, appeared to suggest the charity could face an inquiry into the trusts purpose after it published a report into its colonial history in September.

However, the commission confirmed that there is no formal inquiry or any finding of wrongdoing against the charity.

In response, many in the sector took to Twitter to accuse the regulator and its chair of politicising their roles, and using the National Trusts report to insert itself into the middle of the UKs culture wars.

Chief executive of the NCVO Karl Wilding wrote on Twitter: The National Trust is a fantastic charity. Some people don't like it, inevitable for an organisation that is doing what all good organisations do, and changing with the times. The Charity Commission should ignore those who wish to deploy the National Trust in their culture wars.

In a blog post, former commission board member Andrew Purkis wondered why the regulator was forcing the trust to explain what is so obvious from its charitable purposes, especially when it is struggling with the financial impact caused by the pandemic.

He asked: Is it because the commission feels it has to show Oliver Dowden or the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph that they are responding to the concerns of that part of the public energised by a culture war against wokeness?

Jay Kennedy, director of policy and research at the Directory for Social Change, said that the commission's chair, as a taxpayer-funded servant, should not be making statements in publications whose content is behind a paywall.

The regulator did not respond to any of the criticisms above, but stressed that the trust wrote to the commission in late September, updating it on the negative media scrutiny it was facing.

It was following this update, the commission said, and a wider consideration of matters, that it wrote to the charity to ask further questions in early October.

A spokesperson added: We have written to the National Trust to understand how the trustees consider its report helps further the charitys specific purpose to preserve places of beauty or historic interest, and what consideration the trustees gave to the risk that the report might generate controversy.

We await a detailed response from the charity, and in the meantime have drawn no regulatory conclusions.

In a statement, the National Trust said that The Telegraph itself reported, under a misleading headline, that there is no expectation of a formal inquiry.

We have always researched the history of our places and doing so informs how we care for and present them. As is expected of all charities, the National Trust reports to the Charity Commission on any significant issues affecting our work, said a National Trust spokesperson.

The charity said it had kept the regulator informed about the colonial history report it published, and some of the complaints it received from people who disagreed with it being published.

Baroness Stowell announced over the weekend that she would step down as chair of the commission in February next year.

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Charities criticise regulator over National Trust remarks - Third Sector

Its easy to mock Kanye West running for president.

An erratic late-entrance candidate running on the self-established Birthday Party ticket, West is only on the ballot in 12 states, eligible to win at most 84 of the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the West Wing.

Absent the prohibitive mathematical obstacles to his late campaign, West has not cast himself as a serious or stable candidate. His campaign kickoff this summer featured a public meltdown that raised concerns among his family. His online platform is merely 400 words, identifying policy goals with no specifics, citing scripture under each item. Campaign advertising has extended to a few ads released in the final weeks of the election calling on voters to write-in the 43-year-old rapper to pull off a November upset.

While President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden made their final case on CBSs 60 Minutes, Sunday night, West sat down with Joe Rogan for a three-hour podcast released Saturday.

I believe that my calling is to be the leader of the free world, West told Rogan at the start of the interview. It was something God put on my heart back in 2015.

What ensued was a 180-minute conversation that was difficult to follow. A rambling where West described his long tirades as symphonies and sounded at times like a contestant at a beauty pageant weaving in complex words to sound intelligent or a freshman college student who discovered marijuana for the first time pondering questions like How much is the Earth worth?

When asked what he would do as president, West simply said, Pretty much everything.

After a few pauses, West said he would solve the more than $27 trillion national debt.

When asked how he would handle a crisis episode of foreign aggression, West went silent. Then, sounding like Trump in 2016, he said he would be surrounded with smart people.

I would have the greatest professionals on the planet, West said.

As a presidential candidate, West sounded a lot like the current president did four years ago.

Once I see everything, I never make the wrong decision, West told Rogan at one point. Once Im given the right information, I apply my taste, and I have the best taste on the planet.

Within the erratic outbursts on Twitter, the self-righteous claims, and showcased ignorance of public policy lies a repentant sinner who illustrated a devout Christian faith with depth in the culture wars.

Present throughout the entire three-hour dialogue was a discussion on how Wests faith has shaped the billionaire pop-star today. He made clear, if nothing else, that his sole purpose in life was to live pleasing an audience of one.

When I made Sunday Service, I completely stopped rapping, because I dont know how to rap for God, West told Rogan. All my raps always had nasty jokes. When I went to the hospital in 2016, I wrote, Started church in Calabasas. As we left from 2018 going into 2019, I said, Im not going to let one Sunday go by without starting this church.'

At another intense moment, West said this:

When you remove like even in the schools you remove prayer, you remove God, you remove the fear of God, you create the possibility of the fear of everything else. But watch this, when you instill the fear of God, you eliminate the fear of anything else. And its not that I am fearless. I am definitely, literally definitely shaking and in so much fear of my father, I fear God, and I dont fear nothin else.

West remained most fixated, however, on the topic of abortion, referring to the procedure instead as the a-word when discussing the rappers summer episode breaking down on a South Carolina stage where he revealed his family had almost terminated his daughters pregnancy.

West condemned abortions racist roots as a weapon of eugenics that still takes a disproportionate toll on black lives.

People saw this clip of me crying. Some people didnt know what I was crying about. I was crying about that there is a possible chance that Kim and I didnt make the family that we have today. Thats my most family-friendly way to word that. The idea of it just tears me up inside, that I was part of a culture that promotes this kind of thing, West said. There were 210,000 deaths due to COVID in America. Everywhere you go, you see someone with a mask on. With A, the A word, a culture Ill say it one time, with abortion culture there are 1,000 black children aborted a day. Daily. We are in genocide.

West also mocked Democrats soft-bigotry of low expectations as feeding institutional racism, and derided subjects like Black History Month.

Were given Black History Month and we take that like its some gift to us, West said.

Its programming to us. Racism doesnt end until we get to a point where we stop having to put the word black in front of it, because its like were putting the rim a little bit lower for ourselves We shouldnt have to have a special box. A special month. What they show during Black History Month is us getting hosed down, reminding us that we were slaves. What if we had, Remember When I Cheated On You Month? How does that make you feel? It makes you feel depleted and defeated.

While West lacks the characteristics of a serious presidential contender, theres a place in contemporary American politics for the pop stars participation. An increasingly secular society has begun to mark individuals of deep faith with an aura of taboo. Look no further than the recent attacks on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who was depicted as a judicial candidate taken out of a scene from the dystopian Handmaids Tale.

Wests entrance into the political arena as a faith adherent holds the potential to ignite a more positive change in American society than hundreds of political leaders have in decades by mainstreaming pro-life popularity. Even more than that, Wests message could save millions by bringing the gospel to those who otherwise tune out traditional politicians while destigmatizing the role of faith in politics.

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Kanye West Is An Unserious, But Necessary Presidential Candidate - The Federalist

(October 26, 2020 / JNS) To borrow a phrase from the great Yogi Berra, the upcoming U.S. presidential election is beginning to feel like dj vu all over again.

In 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was down by more than 5 percentage points in many national polls but managed to pull out a stunning electoral college victory by winning in battleground states.

As I wrote in 2015, in a piece titled Have Polls Lost It?: A poll has become the opposite of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I provided many examples, including a Gallup poll according to which then-Republican candidate Mitt Romney would beat incumbent Democrat Barack Obama50 percent to 49 percent in 2012. Obama beat Romney 51 percent to 47 percent.

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Currently, Democratic candidate Joe Biden is ahead of Trump in various polls of key battleground states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. CNN has Biden leading Trump 50 percent to 46 percent in Florida. USA Today has Biden leading 49 percent to 42 percent in Pennsylvania. A Hill/Harris poll has Biden leading 54 percent to 43 percent in Michigan. Real Clear Politics has Biden leading 49.7 percent to 43.5 percent in Wisconsin. Fox News polls are similar, except that they show a 3 percent lead by Trump in Ohio.

In 2016, with two weeks to go before the election, the numbers were not that much different from those of today for these key battleground states. For example, Real Clear Politics had Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton besting Trump in Florida 47 percent to 44.6 percent; in Pennsylvania, 47.2 percent to 42 percent; in Michigan, 47.5 percent to 37.5 percent; and in Wisconsin, 45.3 percent to 39.3 percent.

Although so much is different about this election from that of 2016Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton; the coronavirus has killed more than 200,000 Americans; the cancel culture wars have begun in earnest; and the American people have had a chance to experience Trump as president for four yearsthey are not that much different.

Indeed, as much as things have changed, so much remains the same. And 56 percent of Americans say that they are better off today than they were in 2016.

As a rule, incumbents win a second term. There have been only 10 presidents since 1789 who did not: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland (though he lost, he won a second term eventually, as he served as both the 22nd and 24th president), Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush.

Interestingly, the president to whom Trump is most frequently comparedAndrew Jacksonwon a second term. Jackson won because of a fervently devoted and strong base of support. Trump has a similarly devoted and energized base.

Among Trumps most ardent supporters are Orthodox Jew. It is estimated that in 2016 he received approximately 25 percent of the overall Jewish vote, the vast majority of which came from the Orthodox community.

According to a recent Pew survey, he will receive 27 percent of the Jewish vote this time around. Ami Magazine recently predicted that 83 percent of Orthodox Jews will be voting for him.

Given the closeness of the race in key battleground states, every Orthodox vote becomes that much more significant for him. (See my 2017 article, The Orthodox Have Come of Age.)

Since, in 2016, he only won by 112,911 votes in Florida and only 44,241 in Pennsylvania, there is no doubt that the Orthodox vote was helpful, that the Orthodox voting bloc can indeed sway an election. This is even more evident in Michigan, where he only won by 10,700 votes, and in Wisconsin, where he only won by 22,748 votes.Although the Pew study of 2013 indicated that the Orthodox make up a mere 10 percent of the American-Jewish population, this can be very misleading, because the Orthodox community in a state like Florida is closer to 20 percent of the Jewish population there, which is 657,095.

This means that more than 100,000 votes in Florida will be cast for Trump from the Orthodox community alone, which could tip the scales in his favor. The same goes for Pennsylvania, which has a Jewish population of 434,165. Even assuming that only 10 percent of that states Jews are Orthodox, it would still translate into more than 35,000 votes. Meanwhile, Michigan has a Jewish population of 87,905 and Wisconsin of 33,455. Again, the Orthodox could make the difference between victory and defeat for the president in these states.

It is clear that Orthodox Jews will have a profound effect on the outcome of the election on Nov. 3.

Dr. Joseph Frager is first vice president of the National Council of Young Israel.

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The impact of Orthodox Jews on the US presidential election - JNS.org