Texas: Bible Classes Approved

This from the New York Times:

The state’s Board of Education gave final approval to establishing Bible classes in public high schools, rejecting calls to draw specific teaching guidelines and warnings that such approval could lead to constitutional problems in the classroom.

The Legislature passed a measure in 2007 allowing Bible courses to be offered as an elective. State officials are still waiting for an attorney general’s ruling on whether the classes must be offered to students or left to school districts to decide.

Critics say the rule does not provide specific enough guidelines to help teachers and school districts know how to do that and avoid a First Amendment clash over freedom of religion.

Mark Chancey, associate professor in religious studies at Southern Methodist University, has studied Bible classes already offered in about 25 districts. His study found most of the courses were explicitly devotional with almost exclusively Christian, usually Protestant, perspectives. It also found that most were taught by teachers who were not familiar with the issue of separation of church and state.

Texas District to Settle Bible Suit

A West Texas school district has agreed to change the curriculum for a high school course on the Bible to settle a lawsuit that said it amounted to religious indoctrination.

The federal suit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the People for the American Way Foundation on behalf of eight parents in the Odessa area. It argued that the course curriculum, adopted in 2005 by the Ector County Independent School District, promoted Protestant Christianity and a specific reading of the Bible as a literal
historical document.

Public schools can teach the Bible if done in a neutral way. It cannot be taught as it would be in a Sunday school class, legal scholars said. As part of the settlement, the district agreed to use a new curriculum developed by a committee of local educators.

This from the New York Times.

Teacher fired for claiming the Bible should not be taken literally

Teacher: I was fired, said Bible isn't literal
The community college instructor says

the school sided with students

offended by his explanation of Adam and Eve.

A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted.

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday.

He said he was fired Thursday.

"I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master's degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job," Bitterman said.

Sarah Smith, director of the school's Red Oak campus, declined to comment Friday on Bitterman's employment status. The school's president, Barbara Crittenden, said Bitterman taught one course at Southwest. She would not comment, however, on his claim that he was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue."I can assure you that the college understands our employees' free-speech rights," she said. "There was no action taken that violated the First Amendment."

Bitterman, who taught part time at Southwestern and Omaha's Metropolitan Community College, said he uses the Old Testament in his western civilization course and always teaches it from an academic standpoint.

Bitterman's Tuesday course was telecast to students in Osceola over the Iowa Communications Network. A few students in the Osceola classroom, he said, thought the lesson was "denigrating their religion."

"I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn't given any more credibility than any other god," Bitterman said.

"I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there."Bitterman said he called the story of Adam and Eve a "fairy tale" in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney...

..."As a taxpayer, I'd like to know if a tax-supported public institution of higher learning has given veto power over what can and cannot be said in its classrooms to a fundamentalist religious group," he said. "If it has ... then the taxpaying public of Iowa has a right to know.

What's next? Whales talk French at the bottom of the sea?"

This from the DesMoines Register.