AUSTIN — Biology professors from across Texas stressed the importance of educating students about evolution in a letter to the state education commissioner and said Texas Education Agency employees shouldn't be required to stay neutral on the subject.

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December 5, 2007

In forcing Chris Comer to resign as Texas Director of Science, the Texas Education Agency has confirmed in a most public, unfortunate way the central point of my Austin presentation, "Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse," the mere announcement of which TEA used as an excuse to terminate her: the intelligent design (ID) creationist movement is about politics, religion, and power. If anyone had any doubts about how mean-spirited ID politics is, this episode should erase them. Texas school children depend on the adults at the TEA to protect the quality of their education. For the last nine years at the TEA, after twenty-seven years as a science teacher, Ms. Comer was doing her part, and she got fired for doing it. The children are ultimately the losers.

- Barbara Forrest

Carson v. Carson, 401 N.W.2d 632, 635–36
(Mich. Ct. App. 1986) (quoting trial court as opining that it “was a little bit distraught in finding that there was no particular affiliation [held by either parent] with a church,” because “[p]robably 95 percent of the criminals that I see before me come from homes where there’s no . . . established religious affiliation,”

Sharrow v. Davis, Nos. 244043, 245117, 2003 WL 21699876, at *3
(Mich. Ct. App. July 22, 2003) (noting that “[father] never attended church and his older children were not baptized,” that “[father] felt [the children] should experience many religions and choose one when they were older,” and that though “[mother] did not attend church regularly, she attended periodically and would take all of the children with her”);

Goodrich v. Jex, No. 243455, 2003 WL 21362971, at *1
(Mich. Ct. App. June 12, 2003) (noting “that [father] has a greater capacity and willingness to continue to take the parties’ daughters to church and related activities,” and that trial court had been “concerned with [mother’s] belief that her minor daughters are capable of making their own decisions whether to attend church”);

Sims v. Stanfield, No. CA98-1040, 1999 WL 239888, at *3–*4 (Ark. Ct. App. Apr. 21, 1999)
(noting that lower court based award of custody to father partly on father’s having “‘rekindled’ a relationship with his church,” “regularly attend[ing] services,” and providing “a Christian home,” but declining on procedural grounds to review this);

Tweedel v. Tweedel, 484 So. 2d 260, 262 (La. Ct. App. 1986)
(noting that “The child attends church regularly with the mother and receives religious instruction. The father testified that he has not brought the child to church because the child did not want to go and that he would not force the child to go to church.”);

Staggs v. Staggs, No. 2004-CA-00443-COA, 2005 WL 1384525, at *6
(Miss. Ct. App. May 24, 2005) (noting that “[w]hile [father] is an agnostic and testified that religion is not important to him, [mother] testified that religion is very important to her”);

Weigand v. Houghton, 730 So. 2d 581, 587 (Miss. 1999)
(noting chancellor’s “weighing heavily” as factor in mother’s favor that “mother has seen that [the son] is taken to church and undergone religious training, along with the entire family” and that “[the son’s] best interest would be served by providing religious training”).

Gancas v. Schultz, 683 A.2d 1207, 1213–14 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1996)
(reversing lower court’s transfer of custody from mother to father, based partly on lower court’s “fail[ure] to consider ‘all factors which legitimately have an effect upon the child’s physical, intellectual, moral and spiritual well-being,’” and in particular that while “[m]other . . . takes [daughter] to church whenever [daughter] is with her,” “[f]ather, an admitted agnostic, does not attend church”).

Myers v. Myers, 14 Phila. 224, 256–57 (Com. Pl. 1986)
(“Although the issue of religion is not controlling in a custody case, the religious training of children is a matter of serious concern and is a factor that should be considered in rendering a custody decision. ‘A proper religious atmosphere is an attribute of a good home and it contributes significantly to the ultimate welfare of a child.’ Where it appears that the religious training of the children will cease upon placement in a given custodial setting, courts lean in favor of the religious-minded contestant.”), aff’d without op., 520 A.2d 68 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1986);

Scheeler v. Rudy, 2 Pa. D. & C.3d 772, 780 (Com. Pl. 1977)
(awarding custody to mother, noting as factor in her favor that she often took children to church, while father rarely did, that “[t]his court has often noted the absence of any regular church attendance in the pre- sentence reports of those who have been convicted of some crime, which appear on our desk,” and that “a religious education and upbringing can have a substantial effect upon the outlook and attitudes of a child, and in turn upon the life of the adult he or she will become.”)

Pountain v. Pountain, 503 S.E.2d 757, 761 (S.C. Ct. App. 1998)
(upholding denial of custody to father whom court described as “agnostic,” and stating that “Although the religious beliefs of parents are not dispositive in a child custody dispute, they are a factor relevant to determining the best interest of a child”);

In re F.J.K., 608 S.W.2d 301 (Tex. App. 1980)
(noting “the mother’s neglect of the children’s religious upbringing,” and “[a]n atheistic philosophy [being] . . . discussed by the new husband to some extent with the daughter, prompting her to advise her nursery school teacher that she was ‘not a Christian or a Jew but an atheist’”).

Source: Atheists Discriminated Against in Child Custody Cases

In 1992 a South Dakota man "will agree to present a plan to the Court of how
[he] is going to commence providing some sort of spiritual opportunity for the [children] to learn about God while in [his] custody." Similar language was couched in 2005 Arkansas, 2002 Georgia, 2005 Louisiana, 2004 Minnesota, 2005 Mississippi, 2006 New York, 2005 North Carolina, 1996 Pennsylvania, 2004 South Carolina, 1997 Tennessee, 2000 Texas, and, going back to the 1970s and 1980s, Alabama, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska.

In 2000, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a mother to take her child to church each week, reasoning that "it is certainly to the best interests of [the child] to receive regular and systematic spiritual training" in 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court did the same, partly on the grounds that weekly
church attendance, rather than just the once-every-two-weeks attendance that the child would have had if he went only with the other parent, provides superior "moral instruction."

All this is done under the rubric of the "best interests of the
child" standard, the normal rule applied in custody disputes between two parents and this standard leaves family court judges ample room to consider a parent's ideology.

Source (PDF): PARENT-CHILD SPEECH AND CHILD CUSTODY SPEECH RESTRICTIONS

She was born on January 13, 1820, in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Russia-Poland, as Ernestine Louise Polowsky. Her father was a rich rabbi and her mother the daughter of a wealthy businessman.

At the age of five, Ernestine began to “question the justice of a God who would exact such hardships” as the frequent fasts that her father performed. As she grew older, she began to question her father more and more on religious matters, receiving only, "A young girl does not want to understand the object of her creed, but to accept and believe it." in response. By the age of fourteen, she had completely rejected the idea of female inferiority and the religious texts that supported that idea.

At the age of sixteen, her mother died, and her father betrothed her, without her consent, to a young Jew who was a friend of his. Ernestine, not wanting to enter a marriage with a man she neither chose nor loved, confronted him, professing her lack of affection towards him and begging for release. However, Ernestine was a beautiful woman from a rich family, and he laughed in her face. But Ernestine would not give up so easily. Renting a sleigh and driver, she braved cold, harsh weather to go on a long journey to the notoriously anti-Semitic secular civil court, where she pleaded her case herself. The courts ruled in her favor, not only freeing her from her betrothal, but ruling that she could retain the full inheritance she received from her mother. Although she decided to relinquish the fortune to her father, she gladly took her freedom from betrothal, and triumphantly returned home only to discover that in her absence, her father had remarried to a sixteen year old girl. The tension that developed eventually forced her to leave home at the age of seventeen.

Ernestine then traveled to Berlin, where she found herself hampered by an anti-Semitic law that required all non-Prussian Jews to have a Prussian sponsor. Rather than quietly submit to this law, she instead appealed directly to the king, and was granted an exemption from the rule. Soon afterwards, she developed a room deodorizer, which she sold to fund her travels.

She traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and finally England. Her arrival in England was less than smooth, however, as the ship in which she was sailing wrecked. Although Ernestine did make it to England safely, all her possessions had been destroyed, and she found herself destitute. In order to support herself, she sought work as a teacher in the languages of German and Hebrew and she continued to sell her room deodorizers. While in England, she met Robert Owen, a Utopian socialist, who was so impressed by her that he invited her to speak in a large hall for radical speakers. In spite of her limited knowledge of English, the audience was so impressed that from then on, her appearances were regular. She and Owen were close friends, and she even helped him to found the Association of All Classes of All Nations, a group that espoused human rights for all people of all nations, sexes, races and classes. During her time there she also met William Ella Rose, a Christian jeweler and silversmith, an Englishman and an “Owenite”. They were soon married by a civil magistrate, and both made it plain that they considered the marriage a civil contract rather than a religious one.

In May 1836 the Roses emigrated to the United States, where they later became naturalized citizens and settled in a cozy house in New York city in 1837. The Roses soon opened a small “Fancy and Perfumery” store in their home, where Ernestine sold her perfumed toilet water and William ran a silversmith shop.

Ernestine soon began to give lectures on the subjects that most interested her, joining the “Society for Moral Philanthropists” and traveling to different states to espouse her causes of the abolition of slavery, religious tolerance, public education and equality for women. Her lectures were met with controversy. When she was in the South to speak out against slavery, one slaveholder told her he would have “tarred and feathered her if she had been a man”. When, in 1855, she was invited to deliver an anti-slavery lecture in Bangor, Maine, a local newspaper called her “a female Atheist... a thousand times below a prostitute.” When Ernestine responded to the slur in a letter to the competing paper, she sparked off a town feud that created such publicity that, by the time she arrived, everyone in town was eager to hear her. Her most ill received lecture was likely in Charleston, West Virginia, where her lecture on the evils of slavery was met with such vehement opposition and outrage that she was forced to exercise considerable influence to even get out of the city safely.

In the 1840s and '50s, Ernestine joined the “pantheon of great American women”, a group which included such influential women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Paulina Wright and Sojourner Truth and fought for women's rights and abolition.

In the winter of 1836, Judge Thomas Hertell submitted a married women's property act to the legislature of New York city to investigate methods of improving the civil and property rights of married women, and to allow them to hold real estate in their own name. When Ernestine heard of this resolution, she drew up a petition and began to solicit names in support of it. In 1838, this petition was sent to the state legislature in spite of it only having five names. This was the first petition ever introduced in favor of rights for women. During the following years, she increased both the number of petitions and the number of signatures. In 1849, these rights were finally won.

Ernestine also attended and spoke at numerous conferences and conventions, including, but not limited to: the first national convention of Infidels, the Hartford Bible Convention, the Women's Rights Convention in the Tabernacle, New York City, the tenth national convention of the National Women's Rights Convention in Cooper Institute, New York City, the State Women's Rights Convention in Albany, New York, and the Equal Rights Association meeting in which there was a schism.

Ernestine was elected president of the National Women's Rights Convention in October, 1854, in spite of objections that she was an Atheist. Her election was heavily supported by Susan B. Anthony, who declared that, “every religion – or none – should have an equal right on the platform”.

In her later years, after a six month trip to Europe, she attempted to stay away from platforms and controversy. Within 6 months, she made the closing address at the nationwide Women's Rights Convention. However, her health once again took a downward turn, and on June 8, 1869, she and her husband set sail for England. Susan B. Anthony arranged a farewell party for them, and the couple received many gifts from friends and admirers, including a substantial amount of money.

After 1873, her health improved, and she began to advocate women's suffrage in England, even attending the Conference of the Woman's Suffrage movement in London and speaking in Edinburgh, Scotland at a large public meeting in favor of woman's suffrage. She died in England in 1892.

Quotes

• "It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so."

• "Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, . . . Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters." -- Ernestine Rose, responding to religious heckler at Seventh National Woman's Rights Convention, New York, Nov. 25-26, 1856 (History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 1: 661-663)

• “...The wisest of all ages have acknowledged that the most important period in human education is in childhood. . - - This most important part of education is left entirely in the hands of the mother. She prepares the soil for future culture. . . . But the mother cannot give what she does not possess; weakness cannot impart strength. With an imperfect education . . . can she develop the powers, call out the energies, and impart a spirit of independence in her sons? . . . The mother must possess these high and noble qualities, or she never can impart them to her offspring...”
  

CLASSES DISMISSED
Examples of courses at Christian schools rejected by the University of California:

Course: Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic

Text: American Government for Christian Schools (Bob Jones University Press)

Reason rejected: Content was not consistent with the “empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community.”

Course: Christianity and Morality in American Literature

Text: American Literature: Classics for Christians Vol. 5 (A Beka Book)

Reason Rejected: Used only an anthology instead of complete works; selected works inconsistent with university “expectations regarding critical thinking and broad exposure to writers’ key works.”

Course: Biology

Text: Biology for Christian Schools 2nd Edition (Bob Jones University Press)

Reason rejected: Text “is not consistent with the knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community” and operates from the premise that “science is invalid to the extent it conflicts with Christian belief.”