{"id":395038,"date":"2010-03-05T14:32:34","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T19:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy\/?p=12611"},"modified":"2010-03-05T14:32:34","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T19:32:34","slug":"creationist-mcleroy-loses-in-texas-election-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/395038","title":{"rendered":"Creationist McLeroy loses in Texas election | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am pleased to write that the creationist and generally anti-reality Don McLeroy has lost his bid for re-election<\/a> to the Texas State Board of Education!<\/p>\n

Yay!<\/p>\n

The man who ousted him is Thomas Ratliff, who is — gasp! — an actual educator who has vowed to try to remove the politicization of the board and also to actually – gasp again! — listen to educators when it comes to, y’know, educational topics. You may remember McLeroy is the goofball who infamously said<\/a>, “Someone has to stand up to the experts!”<\/p>\n

However, mitigating the good news somewhat are some things to consider:<\/p>\n

1) McLeroy is still on the BoE for the next seven months before his term runs out. He can do a vast amount of damage to Texas schoolchildren’s education in that time. <\/p>\n

2) Ratliff only won by a very narrow margin, meaning a whole lot of Texas citizens either didn’t know about McLeroy’s maniacal attempts<\/a> at derailing the Lone Star State’s educational system, didn’t care, or actually supported him.<\/p>\n

3) McLeroy and his crew of revisionist creationists have already done so much damage that it cannot be easily repaired. There is a cycle to the way standards and such are reviewed and updated in Texas, so it could be years before things are straightened out, if at all.<\/p>\n

Still, this is good news, and so I won’t use the “Texas: Doomed”<\/a> graphic. Instead, I’ll remind you not to rest:<\/p>\n

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Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Estes and the many other BABloggees who emailed me about this.<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am pleased to write that the creationist and generally anti-reality Don McLeroy has lost his bid for re-election to the Texas State Board of Education! Yay! The man who ousted him is Thomas Ratliff, who is — gasp! — an actual educator who has vowed to try to remove the politicization of the board […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-395038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}