Friday, December 30, 2005
An Odd Argument for Conservatives to Make
The argument that imposing objective standards infringes on believers’ freedom of speech, says an editorial in The Forward, a Jewish newspaper published in New York, "is a common one among opponents of science and their conservative defenders. This week, in response to the Pennsylvania ruling, the nation’s editorial pages were filled with libertarian-sounding arguments that Judge Jones’s decision amounts to an assault on intellectual pluralism and denies parents the right to teach their children their own way of seeing the world."
"It’s an odd argument for conservatives to make. For three decades they’ve been calling for standards, railing against the possibility of multiple realities and blaming woolly-headed liberals for spreading the notion that knowledge is relative. It turns out that the greatest single threat to intellectual standards comes from their own backyard."
"It’s an odd argument for conservatives to make. For three decades they’ve been calling for standards, railing against the possibility of multiple realities and blaming woolly-headed liberals for spreading the notion that knowledge is relative. It turns out that the greatest single threat to intellectual standards comes from their own backyard."
