New Scientist has a bizarre take on the recent Supreme Court decisions upholding the Constitutionality of a Cleveland voucher program. Almost all of the vouchers were used to send students to private Roman Catholic schools, and the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that this did not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
But to New Scientist, this decisions is all about teaching creationism,
But the decision will mean that even fewer US children will be taught evolution. Repeated attempts since the 1920s by Christian fundamentalists in the US to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools, or at least mandate teaching the biblical account of creation as well, have been defeated in court on the grounds that teaching religion in a state-funded school violates the separation of church and state.
Private schools are under no such restriction. So creationists have turned their efforts towards expanding private schooling. The voucher scheme is widely supported by Christian right wing organizations. One Cleveland voucher school states that “the one cardinal objective of education to which all others point is to develop devotion to God as our Creator”.
But if Cleveland parents were obssessed with having their children taught creationism, why would 95 percent of those using the voucher system send them to Catholic schools? Or is New Scientist writer Debora MacKenzie simply so clueless that she doesn’t realize that private Catholic schools have been teaching evolution for decades?
After all, as far back as 1950 Pope Pius XII made it clear there was no doctrinal conflict between evolution and Catholicism.
It’s interesting that the Catholic Church was able to look at scientific changes and incorporate them doctrinally, but New Scientist doesn’t seem to be able to get over its bigoted assumption that creationist and Christian are synonyms.