Joseph Knippenberg of Oglethorpe University has been increasing his profile lately, first through the Ashbrook Center's blog "No Left Turns" and more recently as a columnist for The American Enterprise. Dr. Knippenberg's recent piece for TAE on the Cobb County textbook controversy shows why his work is becoming better known. He has the unusual knack of actually informing through opinion pieces.
I'd give you a snippet, but it just wouldn't do justice to the overall argument. As Instapundit likes to say, "Read the whole thing." You'll come out understanding religion in the public square a bit better than you did before.
5 comments:
Well, Connie, I think you actually do understand this situation and you seem to do so in response to the column.
The sticker is not a violation of the establishment clause.
I found Knippenberg's whole piece to be incredibly disengenuous. He starts off by deliberately misinterpreting Rawls (if I can get Rawls, someone of Knippenberg's stature has to). Then he goes on to offer nonsensical pejoratives (What exactly, may I ask, was the point of mentioning the "just-filibustered Pryor?").
"He starts off by deliberately misinterpreting Rawls."
Sounds like a design inference. :-)
All kidding aside, the article is pretty straightforward. He says, Rawlsians say you should have public reason, not religious ones. Fair enough. But when those public reasons are offered, the grounds shift to, yeah, but you have a "religious motive." What the author is saying is that that shift results in the permanent sequestering of religious citizens from the public square regardless of the quality of their arguments. A motive, after all, is a type of belief. It is a belief that is causally effective in bringing about an action. But the courts have said that the law does not touch beliefs, just actions. So, when a court overturns a law based on the proponents' religious motives, it is in fact doing the very thing it says the law should not do.
This "test" is religious discrimination, pure and simple. It doesn't get any clearer than this.
Actually, dude, they don't mention macroevolution at all and your average layperson couldn't tell you that there were such things as "macro" and "micro" evolution. You're failing your own common sense test under the religion category.
The problem with your critique, Tlaloc, is that at least two of the points don't work.
We have arrived at the point where a credible biologist is defined as "a Darwinist." The minute a previously credible biologist steps off the reservation, he/she ceases to be credible. That's why we usually get it from someone retiring.
For the reason we don't see peer-reviewed journals criticizing the theory in a plain and bold way, see the previous paragraph.
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