The first time I met somebody from Lubbock was back in the early 80s. I was in the service leaning my craft at tech school. I was in charge of a floor in my dorm. One night while making my rounds I investigated noises coming from a dorm room. I open the door to find two men in what they claimed was consensual sex with a woman. Except that the woman had her hands pinned behind her and they were using a hammer handle to violate her.
The nice thing about the service is that I got to beat the crap out of them before the MPs got to beat the crap of them. In the end, neither man was seriously punished. The woman took a voluntary discharged.
Both the men were from Lubbock. Two weeks before they had tried to get me to go to an off base church. They were both devout Baptists. They promised that if I went to church, I could get off of Sunday lawn duty. I declined. I was such a screw up, I knew they could not make good on their promise.
Over the years I’ve met many people from Lubbock, with a few exceptions, most were no better than my two acquaintances from my days in the service. Take the intellectual dishonesty of Arnold H. Loewy. He suggests that Intelligent Design should be taught in school because it will help our children learn to think. In his introductory paragraph, he claims to be an academic but leaves out his religious affiliation.
Currently, a national debate is raging over whether or not to teach intelligent design in public schools. For the most part, fundamentalist Christians support the idea while scientists and most other academics oppose it. Despite my status as an academic, I think intelligent design should be taught in public schools, if it is done the right way.
He is an academic. But the position he stakes out is dishonest. He aligns himself with the forces of science and reason when he is in fact a Christian legal activist. He also paints the picture inaccurately. The is no raging national debate, there is only religious activism and the forces who oppose it. Plus, he leaves out that the U.S. Constitution sides with science. By painting the picture the way he wants us to see it, he can control the context and the content of logically flaw argument which follows.
Read it for yourself, and then weep for the people of Lubbock. With educators like this, there is little hope for their future.
