US college course bans the words 'male' and 'female'

psinno wrote: »

I'm confident concepts exist outside of one countries constitutional restrictions on government action. Usually they even pre-date them. Anyhow https://xkcd.com/386/

zeffabelli wrote: »

I think given they are state employees, there would be a case for a 1st amendment argument.

In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching creationism is unconstitutional. In the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, Judge John Jones III ruled in federal district court that intelligent design is still creationism and equally unconstitutional.

To get around court rulings, Responsive Ed and other creationists resort to rhetoric about teaching “all sides” of “competing theories” and claiming that this approach promotes “critical thinking.”

In response to a question about whether Responsive Ed teaches creationism, its vice president of academic affairs, Rosalinda Gonzalez, told me that the curriculum “teaches evolution, noting, but not exploring, the existence of competing theories.”
...

The only study linking vaccines to autism was exposed as a fraud and has been retracted, and the relationship has been studied exhaustively and found to be nonexistent. But a Responsive Ed workbook teaches, “We do not know for sure whether vaccines increase a child’s chance of getting autism, but we can conclude that more research needs to be done.”

On the scientific method, Responsive Ed confuses scientific theories and laws. It argues that theories are weaker than laws and that there is a natural progression from theories into laws, all of which is incorrect.

The Responsive Ed curriculum undermines Texas schoolchildren’s future in any possible career in science.

In the section on the causes of World War I, the study materials suggest that “anti-Christian bias” coming out of the Enlightenment helped create the foundations for the war. The workbook states, “[T]he abandoning of religious standards of conduct and the breakdown in respect for governmental authority would lead to one of two options: either anarchy or dictatorship would prevail in the absence of a monarch.” Responsive Ed also asserts that a person’s values are based on solely his or her religious beliefs.

A section on World War II suggests that Japan’s military aggression was led by the samurai. They write, “Following World War I, Japan attempted to solve its economic and social problems by military means. The Samurai, a group promoting a military approach to create a vast Japanese empire in Asia, wanted to expand Japan’s influence along the Chinese mainland including many Pacific Islands.”

I asked one of my former professors about this. Rich Smith, an East Asia scholar at Rice University, said, “There were no samurai in Japan after WWI; the samurai class was effectively abolished in 1876, after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.”

Responsive Ed continues to demonstrate its religious and cultural biases in a section on the Philippines, describing the population as made up of “Catholics, Moslems (Muslims), and pagans in various stages of civilization.”

When discussing stem cells, it claims President George W. Bush banned stem-cell research because it was done “primarily with the cells from aborted babies.” The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine debunks this on its website: “A common misconception is that the cells can come from aborted fetuses, which is in fact not possible.”

About LGBTQ rights, Responsive Ed says, “Laws against the homosexual lifestyle had been repealed in many states, but some states continued to ban the behavior.” The homosexual lifestyle?

About President Franklin Roosevelt, it teaches, “The New Deal had not helped the economy. However, it ushered in a new era of dependency on the Federal government.”

Perhaps the workbook’s best line comes when it explains that President Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers out of “a misguided sense of compassion.”