Frivilous

So it looks like the first big federal policy fight of 2005 will be on tort reform. Normally I'm opposed to the kind of "reform" the Bush administration has in mind, but lawsuits like this one make me wonder if there isn't some merit to the idea:

Critics of the November 2003 [gay marriage] ruling by the highest court in Massachusetts argue that it violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of a republican form of government in each state. They lost at the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) in Boston.

Their attorney, Mathew Staver, said in a Supreme Court filing that the Constitution should "protect the citizens of Massachusetts from their own state supreme court's usurpation of power."

Federal courts, he said, should defend people's right "to live in a republican form of government free from tyranny, whether that comes at the barrel of a gun or by the decree of a court."

Interesting turn of phrase, defining "tyranny" as the extension of rights guaranteed to the majority to an oppressed minority. The Supreme Court did the right thing by declining to take the case; and the fewer number of cases like this one that are filed, the better.

No Child Left Informed

Pardon my epistemology, but evolution is a fact. There is still a lively debate over the mechanisms and timelines, but that life evolved on earth over billions of years is just plain fact. If you deny the fact of evolution, you might as well assert that the sun revolves around the earth.

Of course, some people still believe in an earth-centered solar system, and some people still believe that the earth and all life on it was created by God a few thousand years ago. And that's fine. But it's not fine to say these beliefs deserve to be taught as valid scientific alternatives to heliocentrism and evolution.

It seems that every few years the battle to get evolution tossed out of the public schools heats up. And thanks to No Child Left Behind, which mandates a nationwide review of science standards, we are seeing it happen all over again. No rest for the reality-based community, it seems.