Missouri Amendment 2

I was getting ready to go vote during this summer's second Missouri Primary of 2012 and wanted to know what was going to be on the ballot. This was a really particularly sleepy election. For someone in the political middle, disenchanted by both parties, a primary is a not something that raises much motivation. Even though I complain that most elections give you two bad choices and you have to hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, I still don't want to try to influence who is going to be on the ballot.

I looked up the ballot and discovered that there was going to be a state constitutional amendment on the ballot. That's pretty rare. I know that the U.S. Constitution has not added any amendments for a long time and the process to get the constitution amended on the national level is almost impossible when the country is evenly divided on most issues (try to imagine an amendment about guns or gay marriage making it to through congress).

The proposed change was to insure school prayer was a protected right in the state. No one can prosecute anyone that wants to pray in school. It seemed pretty straightforward and completely unnecessary, as this was already guaranteed. No one else in my office knew about the amendment until I told them. My brothers, who I immediately called, both knew about it, but had only just found out about it.

I considered this a really poor choice of elections to put such a supposedly important matter on the ballot. If you are truly up in arms about a subject to the point where you think there needs to be a Constitutional Amendment over it, why do a sneaky stealth move and put it into an almost ignored primary election?

This primary happens to be one that insures that the majority of voters going in would be conservatives and Republicans. Not many Democratic positions were even being contested, but the Republican field was rife with candidates, and many races had far right candidates poised against moderate Republicans. So this field was really heated up.

After the election, the results came in and the amendment passed with about 80% of the vote, an almost unheard of majority. I was disappointed, and still riled about the sneaky way that the measure was put onto the ballot, but I moved on and started to forget about it.

Then I heard one of my science podcasts report that the measure would mean that people that did not want to learn evolution in schools would have the right to refuse to learn it, and that the measure would be challenged.

My first reaction was that this was not what was on the ballot. It said nothing about the conduct of people in classrooms being able to refuse to learn something, it simply said that you couldn't stop someone from praying in school.

I got online to see what the language of the ballot was, and found that it was already taken down from the election board's website. I did find the original Amendment as approved by the General Assembly and read it in full. It did indeed say that anyone that disagreed with any subject in school on religious grounds could not be forced to participate in the curriculum.

That's alarming on two levels. One, the ballot did not even hint about his aspect of the Amendment, and the language of the ballot was both abbreviated and deceptive in that respect. Two, the original article 5 of the state constitution had language in it that already specifically provided for religious freedom, and the ballot language didn't sound that different than the original section. The Amendment was to replace article 5 so most people reading the short ballot description would naturally draw the conclusion that religious freedom in schools was not something that was already a right. The only thing that really changed was the ability to opt out of any education that one deemed against their religion.

It seems to me that there would be no limit to what you could opt out of. The obvious courses would be those including Evolution and Geology, because not only do people not want to be taught something that they feel contradicts Genesis from the Bible, but many people believe the 17th century theologian's accounting of the years in the Bible that puts the age of the earth at about 6,000 years instead of the generally accepted 4.65 billion years. So Geology is, by definition, blasphemy. I can see people opting out of Chemistry because it fails to say that an intelligent creator designed all the elements and molecules. People could probably figure out ways to opt out of English class and Gym class. Once you put a vague exception that allows people to get out of the hard work of learning, they will expend considerable effort in applying that exception to anything and everything they dislike and hope that their feigned religious piety will get them out of it.

We look to the Muslim world and see people in some countries educating their young in Madrases where they read the Koran for 12 hour a day while being beaten and yelled at and we shake our heads at what a shame it is that these people will use their religion to keep their people willfully ignorant. Yet we have plenty of people in this country that will gladly follow that model and hand our youths all the tools they need to avoid opening their minds and learning something true about the world.