Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Keep It Up
Tom Sawyer, running for the District 7 seat on the Ohio Board of Education against Deborah Owens Fink, one of the leaders of the attempts to sneak ID into Ohio classrooms under the radar, was overwhelmingly endorsed by the Stow Teacher's Association last week. The Association represents nearly 400 teachers, counselors and other education professionals in the Stow-Munroe Falls School district. As Mr. Sawyer said:Teachers understand what is at stake in this election. They understand the value of having members of the State Board of Education who will show leadership and creativity instead of resorting to distraction and division.
Mr. Sawyer also received the endorsement of the Portage Democratic Coalition, a network of progressive grassroots activists.
Clearly people are no longer content to allow those in power to continue to neglect public education in this state.
This race, the other races in Ohio and the races in Kansas all remain important. It's no time to let up on the forces who would roll back the Enlightenment. These kinds of elections can have outsized effects precisely because they are fought out at the grassroots level. The Rightous Right have won greater influence in America than their numbers deserve exactly because they are willing to work in the trenches to turn their desires into make-or-break issues for politicians. If we can demonstrate that support for creationism is a "third-rail" for the professional pols, the threat to our schools will be greatly reduced.
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Potential evidence of this effect is on display in the Ohio gubernatorial race where conservative Republican candidate Ken Blackwell has at least opined that ID doesn't belong in science classes:
[Blackwell spokesperson Carlo] LoParo said Blackwell supports offering intelligent design as an elective course in school but not as part of science class.
"He doesn't feel that it's met the necessary academic criteria, but he feels it should be offered as an elective," LoParo said.
That is still a problematical position, but it shows that support for ID is no longer a safe "throwaway" position that can't hurt a conservative candidate. Let's keep making it painful to support ID.
