Cites for your statement. I was coming here to post them anyway.
http://www.progressiveu.org/210727-dover-school-board-incumbents-swept-out-of-office
So, what if a kid protests it? Can they keep him from graduating (not fulfilling requirements of the class)? Is there any kind of protest they can do without screwing themselves in the short-term?
Revtim, take a look at things from my perspective. I just got bad news, what I’d been grumbling about and hoping wouldn’t happen did happen. I want nothing to do with my fellow state members who brought this about. I come to the Straight Dope and find people not only mocking this horrible news, but lumping me in with the idiots who did this thing and condemning me along with them. Can you say you wouldn’t snap and grouch even a bit if that happened to you? You might find it funny, but it’s no laughing matter to those of us who live here, and love this state and want it’s future generations to prosper.
It’s a case of the noisiest mouth getting the service, but that doesn’t mean they are a majority by any means. No more then it means people with Fred Phelps’ veiws are a majority in the U.S., though I’d wager that there are some people in various countries that he’s harrying who might think so. They’re loudmouths, they get attention, and somehow (By giving good head with those open mouths of theirs?) they get things done. At least it’s not like last time, with the teaching of evolution banned entirely. IIRC, President Bush spoke up in support of these people a time or two didn’t he? Maybe you shouldn’t point and laugh so much, since he’s your President too? (Fairly elected or not, he’s still in office.)
Per the rticle, they are ‘downplaying’ evolution. I’m not sure how slippery it is but it is definitely a slope.
Golly gee fuck you, I guess. What the hell are you on about?
I appreciate that Zabali_Clawbane, which is why I already apologized for my remark. Hey, living in Florida, I can relate.
But you know you’re going to have to take some ribbing on this. It’s unavoidable. When people made comments after the 2000 election about Floridians being too stupid to vote, I didn’t throw a fit because I know that the people saying that didn’t truly mean every single person within the borders of those state lines, even though a technical parsing of their comments meant exactly that. And nobody was more pissed than me at Bush “winning” that one (except maybe Gore and Reeder…)
…the hell? Six people made a manifestly stupid decision, and I made fun of them for it. How is that out of line? I even took care to specifically exclude the four board members who voted against the measure (Go, 2/5 of the Kansas Board of Education! You rock!). As mockery goes, that was blue-laser surgery precise. I think I should be commended for my thoughtfulness in not painting the entire population of Kansas with the same broad brush.
Kansas doper checking in. Or rather, lifelong Kansan who’s migrated over to the Missouri side of the Kansas City line. I’ve only read the first page of the thread before composing my reply so my apologies if I’m repeating the words of others.
At my martial arts studio, someone in my class has a bumper sticker on his car. It says “Kansas: as bigoted as you think.”
It’s completely true.
Kansas’s Senate is split 30-10 for Republicans and Democrats respectively so you’d think a lot would be accomplished along Republican lines. It doesn’t happen quite that way. The Republican’s biggest enemy here is the Republican. The party is split down the middle and the rational conservatives are constantly fighting the radical fundamentalists over everything. It’s truly a wonder that anything ever gets done in the Legislature.
Two years ago a Senator from outside Wichita nearly broke down crying over the horrors they were teaching the impressionable kids up at KU’s sex education class. The…the…porn and the…dildos and…I can’t go on, it’s too unspeakable. It was fun to watch in its sad way.
Kansas’s voters have to be constantly vigilant over the influence of fundamentalism on our state school boards. Back in the late ‘90s Kansas v Evolution first made national news and became the laughingstock of the nation. We threw out the wayward school board members, which lasted an entire term. Then another election came and even more fundamentalists snuck onto the board. With a majority of whack jobs in, they were now in control. They called a meeting in Topeka last May, flew in an Intelligent Design “expert” from India on the taxpayer’s dime, and had a sham of a hearing on the merits of teaching ID in schools.
One of the most egregious members of the school board panel is Connie Morris. This woman was a drug abuser and whore for ten years before she found God. This isn’t libel by the way. Morris published an autobiography through a Christian book outlet detailing her trials and tribulations in getting where she is today: in a position to mess up the minds of teens across the state.
In the meeting last May, one of the speakers on Intelligent Design apologized to the audience in response to a question. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have not yet had the opportunity to read the science standards for the state of Kansas.”
“That’s OK” Morris responded. “I haven’t yet either.”
In case you missed that, let me explain further in all capital letters. A SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER ADMITTED SHE COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO READ THE VERY STANDARDS OF SCIENCE SHE WAS READY TO OVERTURN.
Kansas is the home of Fred Phelps. Nuff said.
Kansas is (now the past) home to the Romeo and Juliet laws. It was recently overturned by the State Supreme Court thanks to the ACLU. A mentally retarded gay 19 year old was in prison for sucking the cock of a willing 16 year old. His sentence was to last for approximately 17 years. Had the 19 year old instead gone down on a 16 year old girl, his maximum sentence would have been a year and a half. The law was purposely written into the books in such a bigoted fashion to punish the gays. Well, I suppose to be technical, the new law was written in to alleviate the sentence of straights, but the effect was still the same.
Kansas is a great state but there are a LOT of problems to it. I really don’t know where to begin solving them but I know being the laughing stock of the world cannot be a good thing. We’re going to lose employment opportunities as businesses refuse to come to Kansas (this has happened in Missouri thanks to the Governor’s beliefs in stem cell research). We’re not going to be able to compete academically with other states. High schoolers will be ill-prepared in college. It’s just a sad state of affairs, and that works on multiple levels.
Kimstu - Thanks for pointing out what was changed. I hadn’t seen the previous language, and I’m not well-versed on the code words of the ID debate. Even though this is the Pit, not GD, I thought the actual words ought to be part of the discussion. That’s all I was trying to accomplish. Let the Pitting continue.
That happens anyway. The simplest way to put it, is “well you assholes vited for him”. Why doesn’t Kansas do the smart thing (hahahahaha), and follow the people in Pennsylvania? There a school board was pushing ID, so they were all voted out of office. That would send a real strong message. But, Kansas is “special”.
Well, i guess i could have ranted and foamed about it, but i wasn’t aware that a simple statement of my opinion might lack the requisite conviction for some people.
Unless you can claim that your experience coverages a representative sample of the state’s population, it is merely anecdotal evidence. In my personal experience, almost no-one voted for George Bush; doesn’t change the result of the election.
Well, i never made any claim that demonizing the majority was acceptable. I merely asked whether, if we do indeed find evidence that most Kansans support this move, this can tell us anything about the place and the people living there.
As for whether most Kansans do, in fact, support this move, i really don’t know. But, as i suggested in my previous post, in a state where BofE members are elected based on what appears to be a roughly proportional districting arrangement, any decision by that Board suggests that a pretty good number of the state’s population supports it. Not necessarily a majority, especially in a vote like this, which was on won 6-4, but enough that any claim about a “tiny minority” needs to be taken with considerable skepticism.
As for the whole “you live under Bush” thing, this is something about democratic politics that i’m genuinely conflicted about. I’ve said on this board before that, in a democracy, there is a certain extent to which all citizens need to take some responsibility for the policies enacted by their elected representatives. While arguing “I didn’t vote for the guy” is, in some ways, compelling, it doesn’t deal with the fact that there is some measure in which all citizens of a democracy are responsible for the events that allow a particular outcome even to be possible.
Given the typical turnout in American elections, it is possible (even probable) that only a minority of Kansas’s citizens voted for the six Board members who supported this proposal. But those who stayed home for the elections need to bear some responsibility for this decision, even if they are adamantly opposed to it. Given the direction of educational policy in Kansas over the past years, any Kansan who claims to have been unaware that this was a live issue simply hasn’t been paying attention. And if those Kansans stayed home on election day, then they are just about as big a dumbass as someone who actively supports this proposition.
Actually, rather than simply assume what turnout might have been, i decided to go to the website of the Kansas Secretary of State, which oversees elections in the state. It seems, from looking at the statistics (available on that site as Excel and pdf files), that five of the ten education Board members are elected every two years, suggesting a four year tenure before each individual member comes up for re-election. Odd number districts were up for re-election on 2002, and even number districts came up last year.
In 2002, statewide voter turnout in Kansas was 52.7 percent. A fairly typical level of voter apathy. Last year was quite a different story, with statewide turnout at 71.6%, a pretty good number. Of the four Board members who opposed the new science policy, three were elected last November in an election with a very large turnout, suggesting that there is some argument to be made that only a minority of Kansans support the new standards (the votes of each Board member on this issue can be found here). Still, all six of the Board members who supported the measure have been elected (or re-elected) by the voters of Kansas within the past three years, at a time when any informed voter surely knew that the question of science standards was one of the key educational issues that the Board would be dealing with.
For better or worse, a democratic polity is often known and judged by the people it elects to make decisions on its behalf.
If you’re working towards part of the solution, good on you. And i agree with you about it being rather counterproductive and stupid to demonize an entire state. But the fact is that, in a democratic society, the people bear some responsibility for the actions of their elected representatives.
Furthermore, my whole participation in this thread was based originally on your assertion that ony a “tiny minority” of Kansans support this measure. In a system where there is some democratic accountability, and where voters in the last two elections knew (or should have known) what the key educational issues would be, the fact that the Board still has a majority of members willing to vote for the new standards casts severe doubt on any claim that only a “tiny minority” of Kansans support the measure.
You aren’t the only one to have missed this. Back on post #86:
And post #101:
ROFLMAO. Just because Bush believes in voodoo and magic doesn’t mean a damn thing to some of us. Among some of us, saying something is supported by Bush is like showing a corpse to the vultures - we just have to start circling… After all, he is the “faith based” and “reality challenged” president to some of us. But let’s not derail into another Bush sucks discussion. ID is stupid. Creationism is stupid. That kansas school board is stupid. Anyone who doesn’t belong to the local creationist religious group should be thoroughly enraged that such ignorant drivel can be jammed down their throats. The purpose of education, and of science, is to reduce ignorance, not increase it.
I don’t understand the people who take offense that someone insults the state they live in. It’s just a location. Insult Texas. I don’t care, and I was born there. Insult Arkansas. I don’t care, that’s just where my parents lived as I was growing up. Insult Georgia, Texas again or Missouri. I don’t care. Those are just placed I lived and worked.
Every one of you with your offensi-meter going off know damn well that the comments about Kansas are hyperbole. Nobody believes every person in Kansas is as dumb as this. But goddammit, there isn’t time for every person to put every disclaimer and caveat on every freakin’ sentence they write.
Grow up, thicken your skin and get over it.
Well, as a Georgian I am hardly in a position to mock Kansas and Kansans,but I do anyway. What a bunch of maroons! What a load of gullibles!!! I can’t BELIEVE the voters of Kansas go for this crackpot Intelligent Design shit, but they do, they LOVE it!
Last night on PBS they had a really neat, offbeat little film called “Okie Noodlin’” about a sport enjoyed by Oklahoma good ol’boys in which they go into various lakes and rivers and such and feel on the bottom for catfish holes, then reach in and let the catfish bite their hands and then pull the catfish out to the surface – huge catfish, three foot-long, sixty-pound monsters, (check out the photos on the site link I provided) all without the benefit of hooks, line and sinkers. Sure, sometimes they get bitten and so forth, but still, it’s hand-fishin.’
Those Okie good 'ol boys didn’t look like they were burdened with a lot of extra brain cells, but on the evidence, they are smarter than Kansans.
Now, coming from a state which has residents who regularly do their best to lower average human IQ, I fully sympathize with Una and other sane Kansans. I gotta tell you, though, the only way to get past this sort of thing is to learn to laugh at it, even while you’re fighting it. Otherwise, they’ll wear you down with the sheer massive, unmoveable bulk of their stupidity.
John Mace
Hello John ? Read any statistics lately about how US students compare to students in other industrialized countries regarding math and science knowledge ? I’d hardly call that a position of “leadership”. So, let’s give American students the opportunity to be even more scientifically inept.
And look who we have as the leader of our country. Not an inspiring figure for improving America’s educationable system is he?
Since when does Kansas = America? And we don’t even know how this is going to be implemented in specific school districts within Kansas. It makes for a good news story, and lets people poke fun at the “yokels” in Kansas, it isn’t going to make one bit of difference in the overall scheme of things.
The fact that I quoted the three specific examples right after saying it pretty much limits the scope there. However, it’s good of you to apologize for saying what you said; that at least should be recognized as part of your good character.
And on the subject in general, it’s not clear at all to one that it’s “hyperbole” unless one takes the time to investigate every single doper’s posting style and preferences to know if they mean hyperbole or if they’re just someone that thinks its reasonable to damn an entire population based on this decision. I’m sure that anyone using hyperbole could easily use their fingers to post to clarify once they shot their mouth off and were called on it. Given the wide range of personalities and prejudices on this Board, one never knows if someone is serious or not unless one personally is familiar with the poster.
And then there’s another irony in people being offended because someone is being offended. We can go around all day on that one, and I have a ham to cook so no thanks.
mhendo, your post is well researched and reasonable. However, it’s also important to the discussion to note that in 2004, 4 of the 5 Board members ran unopposed:
Sue Gamble ran unopposed and received 113,764 votes (voted no)
Kathy Martin ran unopposed and received 86,519 votes (voted yes)
Carol Rupe ran unopposed and received 56,589 votes (voted no)
Steve Abrams ran unopposed and received 80,981 votes (voted yes)
Bill Wagnon ran and won against Robert Meissner (voted no)
It’s somewhat depressing that the opposition was not able to mount any campaign against the two unopposed members who voted “yes”. What this means I am uncertain about. Approximately 1.2 million people went to the polls (based on the Presidential results), and relative to that only very few voted one way or the other for the Board Members in question, either because they weren’t in the right district, or because they didn’t care.
At least the representative from my district (Gamble) voted “no”.
KU? As in Kansas University?
If somebody says something like “Everybody in the state of Kansas is an idiot” you need to research that person’s posting history to realize that’s hyperbole? Hyperbole is the reasonable assumption, I think. Do you know people who actually believe every person in any state, to a one, has some particular trait? And that trait stops at the federally-mandated state line? Common sense tells me that in the vast majority of times somebody says something like that, it’s hyperbole.
Here’s an idea. Next time, instead of ignoring probability and assuming it isn’t hyperbole and accusing people of “stateism” or whatever, why not go with probability and assume it is hyperbole unless evidence shows otherwise? You’ll be right more often.
Who’s offended? I simply think you misunderstood and over-reacted. I feel no offense.
Ayup.