Sunday, February 15, 2009, 5:33pm
The repercussions that were expected from the Louisiana legislature's passage and Gov. Bobby Jindal's signing of the creationist 2008 LA Science Education Act have begun. Louisiana taxpayers and schoolchildren are now reaping what the legislature and governor have sowed: the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, one of the nation's leading scientific societies, is boycotting Louisiana. In a February 6, 2009, letter [pdf] to Gov. Bobby Jindal, SICB Executive Committee President Richard Satterlie told the governor that "The Executive Committee voted to hold the 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City in large part because of legislation SB 561, which you signed into law in June 2008.... Utah, in contrast [to Louisiana], passed a resolution that states that evolution is central to any science curriculum." [See the resolution adopted by the Utah State Board of Education affirming that "The Theory of Evolution is a major unifying concept in science and appropriately included in Utah's K-12 Science Core Curriculum." Contrast this resolution with the recent decision by the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to strip the prohibition against teaching creationism from the policy implementing the LSEA.]