In this day and age, it can be tough to be a public school science teacher who believes in the Bible and questions evolution. I’m sure that many, so that they can keep their jobs and not be “Expelled,” quietly follow the dictates of their local school districts. John Freshwater, who teaches middle school science in Mount Vernon, Ohio, has had his share of run-ins with his bosses in the 21 years he’s taught in the Mount Vernon school system over his views of evolution versus intelligent design.

Last week, Freshwater agreed to a directive from the school district and his principal that ordered him to take down a poster of the Ten Commandments from his classroom door and posters featuring Bible verses from the walls, and to remove Bibles from a shelf, but he has refused to get rid of his personal Bible he keeps on his classroom desk. “[That Bible is] something he draws personal inspiration from,” R. Kelly Hamilton, one of Freshwater’s attorneys, told The Columbus Dispatch. “It just so happens that it’s a Bible. For some people it’s a personal photograph or a coffee mug.”

The school district, of course, fears that a Bible sitting on a teacher’s desk shows favoritism toward a particular religion and violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (In its statement, the school district did not address any concerns it had over its denial of the Free Exercise Clause.) And, not surprisingly, the ACLU has weighed in, coming down on the side of the school district.

On Thursday, hundreds of supportive students held a rally at the high school and started a petition drive for the teacher who’s affectionately known as “Fresh H2O.” They also made a statement by bringing their own Bibles to school and plopping them down on their desks.

Barbara Smith, a mother of one of Freshwater’s former students, told the Mount Vernon News, “If he was doing something wrong I could understand it. He’s not doing anything wrong. They have taken everything away out of the schools. … When I was in school, we prayed in the morning. Now, they don’t. That’s what’s wrong with the schools today. The discipline has gotten so out of control. The kids have gotten so out of control. They’ve taken everything [the values] out.”

And, of course, we have things like this happening (or, in this case, almost happening) in schools today.

UPDATE (April 23): Today’s Mount Vernon News reported on an investigation of Freshwater’s conduct. (HT: Erasmus)

When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors found a hairy monkey arm hidden in Mamie Manneh’s New York City garage, she claimed it appeared “as a gift from God in heaven.”

The inspectors didn’t buy it. Federal agents slapped Manneh with smuggling charges, saying she illegally imported 12 cardboard boxes filled with the “skulls, limbs and torsos” of endangered monkeys. Manneh countered that eating monkey meat is part of her religion, and now the case is turning into a clash between competing government interests: religious liberty, public health, and protection of endangered species.

Manneh, a West African immigrant, attends a Staten Island church that combines Christianity with African tribal customs. She and other congregants eat monkey meat (or bushmeat) on baptisms, Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and weddings. Her supporters said in a sworn statement, “We eat bushmeat for our souls.”

The meat comes from Africa’s endangered green monkey, and the federal government argues that it has an interest in conserving the species. A criminal complaint also cautioned against monkey meat’s potential health risks, including “diseases like Lassa fever, Ebola, HIV, SARS and monkeypox.”

Roger Severino, legal counsel for the Becket Fund, told WoW the Becket Fund has advised Manneh’s lawyers and maintains that conservation shouldn’t trump religious liberty: “The Endangered Species Act didn’t repeal the First Amendment.” He also said that public health concerns are irrelevant to the facts of the case since the meat was smoked, dried and safe for consumption.

Yes, eating monkey meat is foreign to Western culture, but Severino said “the First Amendment protects unfamiliar religions.” The government allows other religious groups an exemption for illegal or imported substances, Severino said, and “the government can’t pick and choose what religion it likes and doesn’t like based on taste.”

WMB has often posted on Indoctrinate U, the documentary by Evan Maloney about free speech and political correctness on campuses around the country.  It’s an amateur attempt to do something like a Michael Moore documentary from a conservative angle.  The kid has promise, but he’s not quite there yet, it seems.  But maybe he is, given the fact that Stanley Fish is writing Times columns about him.

Fish gives a fair, albeit predictable, treatment of Maloney’s film, calling most of the charges red herrings.  But he does write this:

Still, when all the red herrings and non-issues have been checked off, there remain some serious questions. Why, Maloney asks, should “schools pay people to operate offices and programs that are blatantly political in nature?” (He has in mind offices and programs like Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, African American Studies, Chicano Studies.)

Read Fish’s answering of this charge here.  Learn more about the documentary here.

Kurt Anderson at New York Magazine says, Who cares if the meany weirdo president of Iran came and spoke at Columbia?  So what?  As Roland says to his comrades-in-arms in The Song of Roland, What are you, a bunch of sissies? 

For a while now, I’ve fretted that we’re turning into a nation of weenies and permanently enraged censors, that too many of us are afraid of letting disagreeable or uncomfortable ideas into the limelight. If it’s not the p.c. overreach of campus “speech codes” or the attempts to criminalize “hate speech,” it’s the FCC’s crackdown on cussing in PBS documentaries and the Secret Service’s keeping protesters fenced off in “free speech zones.” But during the last month, this impulse to squelch-indulged by the left and the right and the milquetoast middle-seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as if we’ve entered a permanent state of hysterical overreaction.

This is a good read, and my contrary nature wants to agree.  But it’s not that easy.  We live in a pluralist society, and one thing we don’t really like to discuss is that each worldview within that culture really claims supremacy to itself, as in “I believe X, and you believe Y, and they believe Z, and you can keep believing in Y and Z, but it’s really X that makes all that possible, so X is really the driving worldview of the culture…”  And X doesn’t like it when This happens, and Y doesn’t like it when That happens, and Z doesn’t like it when The Other Thing happens.  And all this means that somebody is complaining all the time about something, which makes it sound like we’re a nation of complainers.  And maybe we are.  But the bigger issue is, Whose culture is it?  

HT: AL DAILY