tagos
April 26, 2012, 9:27am
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Catholic church urges pupils to sign anti-gay marriage petition
The Roman Catholic church has written to every state-funded Catholic secondary school in England and Wales asking them to encourage pupils to sign a petition against gay marriage.
Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: "This is a clear breach of the authority and privilege that the Catholic Education Service has been given in schools.
“Surely it is no part of its remit to promote a specific political campaign from this purely sectarian viewpoint. It is disgraceful that children are being encouraged into bigotry when they are attending a state school paid for by taxpayers.”
I can just imagine the shreiking and wailing that would go up if a secular school tried to get kids to sign a pro petition.
For a more fair and balanced report we need to turn to the ever-reliable Daily Mash.
Catholic schools launch ‘eurgh, benders’ petition
You aren’t just imagining… we do when they do things like that.
Revtim
April 26, 2012, 12:52pm
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Great word in that article I wish I knew back in 4th grade: “gaymocentric”
tagos
April 26, 2012, 1:37pm
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Then I’m sure you’ll have no problem posting a link to a story about a national secular organisation taking public money to fund their schools drumming up pro-gay marriage petitions then.
By “like that” I meant to bring into play other liberal subjects like global warming hysteria and the warm glow of the Obama presidency to name a few.
Do you mean a secular private school or a public school? (Actually, these terms may not have the same meaning in the UK – I mean a private school as one that’s funded by tuition payments from students as opposed to government money).
Heh – remember the music video, “Umm..um..um.. Barack Hussein Obama!”
Good times.
If you’re saying that the “shrieking an wailing” would be a bad thing, why is your shrieking and railing any better? Sure, I agree with you on the politics, but I’m not keen on either side getting minor children involved. If it were a secular, government run school, I would be livid.
Although, if you want insane devotion to a president, maybe you’ll love this ? <– video of kids, praying to a cardboard cutout of GeeDub.The Bricker System™
Lobohan:
Although, if you want insane devotion to a president, maybe you’ll love this ? <– video of kids, praying to a cardboard cutout of GeeDub.The Bricker System™
That was creepy. What the hell language was the teacher speaking about half-way through? It sounded like Hindi, but I’m sure it’s not. I don’t think it was Latin or Hebrew.
I haven’t watched the whole video in years (and I can’t hear it now), but as I recall, it was speaking-in-tongues.
Mahata-mada-nata-hidi-manata. Ok, tongues it is!
I think you folks need a Henry IX. There’s some Catholic Stompin’ called for!
Lobohan:
Although, if you want insane devotion to a president, maybe you’ll love this ? <– video of kids, praying to a cardboard cutout of GeeDub.
That’s .. eh… insane, all right.
But no, I was more trying to focus on the difference between private actors (free to be insane) and government actors (not free to be insane). A private school can ask their students to pray to Bush, Obama, or Cthulu without running afoul of law. A public school can’t.
Gee I don’t know kids, what if we call a conservative, Republican, Mormon Scientist (!) to tell us about this “hysteria”?
The WSJ authors say that, although something like 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that humans are causing “significant” global warming, there really is a lot of disagreement about how much humans contribute to the total. The 97% figure comes from a 2009 study by Doran and Zimmerman.
So they don’t like Doran and Zimmerman’s survey, and they would have liked more detailed questions. After all, D&Z asked respondents to say whether they thought humans were causing “significant” temperature change, and who’s to say what is “significant”? So is there no real consensus on the question of how much humans are contributing?
First, every single national/international scientific organization with expertise in this area and every single national academy of science, has issued a statement saying that humans are causing significant global warming, and we ought to do something about it. So they are saying that the human contribution is “significant” enough that we need to worry about it and can/should do something about it. This could not happen unless there was a VERY strong majority of experts. [UPDATE: Here is a nice graphic to illustrate this point. H/T Adam Siegel.]
But what if these statements are suppressing significant minority views–say 20%. We could do a literature survey and see what percentage of papers published question the consensus. Naomi Oreskes (a prominent science historian) did this in 2004, surveying a random sample of 928 papers that showed up in a standard database with the search phrase “global climate change” during 1993-2003. Some of the papers didn’t really address the consensus, but many did explicitly or implicitly support it. She didn’t find a single one that went against the consensus. Now, obviously there were some contrarian papers published during that period, but I’ve done some of my own not-very-careful work on this question (using different search terms), and I estimate that during 1993-2003, less than 1% of the peer-reviewed scientific literature on climate change was contrarian.
Another study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010, looked at the consensus question from a different angle. I’ll let you read it if you want.
Once again, the WSJ authors (at least the few that actually study climate for a living) know very well that they are a tiny minority. So why don’t they just admit that and try to convince people on the basis of evidence, rather than lack of consensus? Well, if their evidence is on par with the graph they produced, maybe their time is well spent trying to cloud the consensus issue.
The WSJ authors further imply that the “scientific establishment” is out to quash any dissent. So even if almost all the papers about climate change go along with the consensus, maybe that’s because the Evil Empire is keeping out those droves of contrarian scientists that exist… somewhere.
The WSJ authors give a couple examples, both of which are ridiculous, but I have personal experience with the Remote Sensing article by Spencer and Braswell, so I’ll address that one. The fact is that Spencer and Braswell published a paper in which they made statistical claims about the difference between some data sets without actually calculating error bars, which is a big no-no, and if they had done the statistics, it would have shown that their conclusions could not be statistically supported. They also said they analyzed certain data, but then left some of it out of the Results that just happened to completely undercut their main claims. This is serious, serious stuff, and it’s no wonder Wolfgang Wagner resigned from his editorship–not because of political pressure, but because he didn’t want his fledgling journal to get a reputation for publishing any nonsense anybody sends in.
The level of deception by the WSJ authors and others like them is absolutely astonishing to me.
Barry
Remember kids, just because the right wing media says so, science in reality has no sides to take. And every person from the right that does appreciate science should tell their sources to do better regarding this issue.
Can’t they risk losing their tax exempt status though?
Bricker:
That’s .. eh… insane, all right.
But no, I was more trying to focus on the difference between private actors (free to be insane) and government actors (not free to be insane). A private school can ask their students to pray to Bush, Obama, or Cthulu without running afoul of law. A public school can’t.
No, the public schools are limited to publishing textbooks lying about the Civil War.
Pervasive, institutional examples of children being taught lies with a political agenda doesn’t ever seem to bother most conservatives. In fact, if you took a poll of GOP voters, you’d probably find the majority were in favor of it.
But a one-off like that video of those children singing about Barack Obama (which, yes, of course, was bizarre and inappropriate) and the right never lets it go. Of course, that affected a thousandth as many children.
What_the:
By “like that” I meant
…that my standards of evidence are so flexible they make Mr. Fantastic look like a cigar store Indian.
But we already knew that.
mister_nyx:
No, the public schools are limited to publishing textbooks lying about the Civil War.
Pervasive, institutional examples of children being taught lies with a political agenda doesn’t ever seem to bother most conservatives. In fact, if you took a poll of GOP voters, you’d probably find the majority were in favor of it.
Maybe. But what lies with a political agenda are you picturing? A concrete example or two would help.
Oh shit, this is how it starts! Bricker is going to have to come to FDR moments in the same week!