Talk About a Permanent Vegetative State

Florida. Oh, Florida. Where would this country be without your hanging chads and your young Cuban refugees? How could we make do without your media firestorm over one person’s existence and the liberal activist judges who sentenced her to death? And then there’s the matter of your 27 Electoral College votes. You know what? I can’t go on with this charade any longer. Florida, will you marry me?

What’s this, you ask? Why the public display of affection for Florida this afternoon? The Florida House is expected to pass an Academic Bill of Rights. That sounds honorable enough, doesn’t it. It has the phrase “bill of rights” right in the name, how can that be bad?

Biology professors who teach evolution might be forced to lecture on creationism. History profs who teach about the Holocaust might be compelled to present the arguments of those who deny that the genocide of 6 million Jews occurred.

With these "rights" codified in state law, an aggrieved student could take a complaint to the courts. Instead of a school's faculty deciding what's taught, the content of courses could be decided in lawsuits.

Makes sense to me! Some people would prefer a faith-based education to a fact-based one, so they’ll sue to make sure that a degree from any Florida university is worth slightly less than the paper it’s printed on. Standards, be damned! What’s funny are these Republicans. The world is so keepin’ them down, man! They’re so sick and fucking tired of only controlling the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, most local governments and lower courts. They need to brainwash the children, or else their way of thinking will forever end up in the memory hole.

[Students] are being subjected to "biased indoctrination." Their tormenters are professors, or as Baxley calls them, "dictators."

The Republican state representative from Ocala has come up with a solution: An "academic freedom bill of rights" meant to help any student who feels pushed around by the liberals and secular humanists who are turning our campuses into anti-capitalist re-education camps -- like the gulag, only with kegs and football.
…

Baxley says the bill is needed because students with conservative views are now made to feel like outcasts.

Boo-hoo! Poor conservative kids. People laugh at them when they say the world was created by God 5000 years ago despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary. Kids can be so cruel.

"Just imagine, if, in medical school you had a requirement to teach Scientology or the efficacy of prayer or any other alternative that some students thought was a valuable scholarly approach," said Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach. He and Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, cast the only "no" votes in last week's meeting of the House Choice and Innovation Committee. The six Republicans on the panel, including Susan Goldstein, of Sunrise, voted for it.

At the hearing, Gelber asked Baxley if it was true that his bill would give legal standing to students who wanted their courses to include Scientology or refute the Holocaust.

"Well, freedom is a dangerous thing, isn't it?" Baxley answered. "You might hear some things you didn't want to hear. You might get exposed to something you can't control ... [Academic freedom] is not just to protect leftist views."

Alright, that’s quite enough! This isn’t funny anymore. The whole point of getting an education is to fucking learn something, you assholes. The mainstream media is the only place where any crackpot with a half-baked idea gets to present it as if it were equivalent to reality. But in a university setting, one presents facts and dismisses nonsense. That’s the fucking point.

And once and for all, people in academia aren’t liberal because they’ve been programmed to be so, they’re liberal because liberalism encourages nuance, the exploration of ideas, and most importantly independent thought. Just like universities. Conservatism as defined by Bush’s Republican party (and religion, by the way) encourages turning your brain off and letting someone else tell you what to think. There’s no nuance in calling Kerry, a true war hero, a coward after leaving Vietnam upon receiving his third purple heart. There’s no nuance in completely dismissing the overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution and relying on a literal interpretation of a book written who knows how long ago. There’s no nuance in repeating 9/11, WMD, 9/11, WMD over and over in reference to Iraq, which, if you look at the FACTS, had nothing to do with either.

Florida, you know I’ll always love you, but if you change these rules and force the courts to lower academic standards in your state, you’re going to lose whatever academic prestige you might have thought you had. No one will be coming from out of state to go to school there, except maybe to party and watch football. And the kids that do go there with be the true victims of this story. They’re going to go to your universities with their sub-par standards, graduate ignorant, and work at Disney World. Is that what you want? Wouldn’t it be nice if at least a few could go on to work at NASA too?

[thanks to The Jeffersonian, ever vigilant in his fight against ignorance]