The Discovery Institute Confuses Me Sometimes

People have rights to talk to anyone they’d like. But, in an offical capacity as a member of a local Board of Education, your conversations are subject to FOIA. So if a Board Member talks to Paster John, Rabbi Joshua, or a Fellow of DI about what is to be taught at a public school or even school policy on morals and values, a FOIA request is filed and the public circus begins. FFRF does a 1000 of these a year.

Here’s today’s:

An example of that last might be: Via mind-reading, you can determine that ID proponents seek to mandate intelligent design in the public schools despite their years of urging against precisely such an extremely misguided idea.

We don’t have to read minds to see this attempt to mandate IDC in public schools, we can observe their actions. You don’t need laws to teach science in public schools.

Tracing the evolution of antievolution legislation.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6268/28

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When the Judge saw that the Intelligent Design manual to be taught had clearly been created by doing a “Replace All” instances of “Creationism” with the phrase “Intelligent Design”.

There was not much left to say when even the ID advocates were willing to use - - word for word - - a document written to teach Creationism!

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If FFRF is filing a 1000 FOIA requests a year about local school board actions, it’s wasting an awful lot of everybody’s time and money. The FOIA applies only to Federal government agencies.

There are Free of Information Request laws at every level of government including school boards.

No it is not a waste of time and money to fight for every person’s Constitutional right to be Free FROM religious intrusion into** our secular schools that we all pay taxes for.

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From http://www.foiadvocates.com/faq.html

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Sorry I am using the term FIOA too broadly. There are also State, county, and local level Freedom of Information laws. Even in Kentucky where every month’s worth of Ark Encounter’s attendance is gathered from the Williamsboro Fire Fee. It is easy to get zoning permit information from my town if I want to find out if my neighbor redid their bathroom. So you are correct that you wouldn’t use the Federal FOIA at a local level like a school board, however, in most states, and localities their are Freedom of Information requests that one could make to get email conversations between board of education members and religious institutions.

@Patrick I think a pattern of higher precision in some of your statements would be helpful. Dropping rhetorical bombs is fun, but there is some opportunity to actually educate people here. Misusing the term “FOIA” is a great example of how your statements are misrepresenting FFRF work, though I am sure you have no ill motive in this. It would be better to describe things correctly enough that understanding could increase.

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