The ID Debate Comes To Wisconsin

That's not actually true, since it implies that there will be debate. Which I doubt.

Unless you believe that Republicans hate science, and equate any effort by them to leave the question open as evidence of their evil Neanderthal pretentions. That's how Rep. Terese Berceau (a completely unrelated tee bee) is framing it:

Two Democratic lawmakers introduced a plan Tuesday that would ban public schools from teaching intelligent design as science, saying “pseudo-science” should have no place in the classroom.

The proposal is the first of its kind in the country, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and comes as a debate over how to teach the origins of human life rages in local school districts.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Terese Berceau, D-Madison, acknowledged the measure faced an uphill fight in a Legislature where Republicans control both houses.

The measure would force material included in science curriculums to describe only natural processes. The material also would need to follow the definitions of science adopted by the National Academy of Sciences.

Thank God goodness we have the legislature to protect us from the horrors of considering at a tender age that we got here by any other means than a completely self-generated chain of stupendous accidents on the part of the universe (you may call her Gaia).

“Our children must be exposed to what science really is about and how the scientific enterprise functions, free of political or religious connotations,” Berceau said at a news conference...

Like secular humanism, Ms. Berceau?

John Calvert, managing director of Intelligent Design Network, a Kansas nonprofit that advocates the teaching of the theory, said the bill “would cause that discussion to be conducted in a one-sided way.”

“It's problematic philosophically because you are promoting a nontheistic type of religion and it's problematic scientifically,” he said.

Sara Vitaska of the National Conference of State Legislatures said several states introduced bills regarding intelligent design in 2005 and 2006, but most of them were to give school districts more authority to teach alternatives to evolution.

So, like, Forward, Wisconsin! Not.

My bet? In ten or twenty years alternative schooling skyrockets as the educational choice of parents in Wisconsin. Complete inflexibility on Darwinian evolution will be one of the reasons.