Season 2, Episode 36: The FIRST ANNIVERSARY EPISODE, with Professor PZ Myers!
It’s our first birthday! We’ve finally reached season 2 and to help us celebrate, we have cephalopod nut, Biologist, educator and outspoken atheist blogger Professor PZ Myers on the show with us to talk about his “vacation,” the book he’s writing, his trip to the Creation Museum, turtle hunting, how he met Richard Dawkins and his enduring friendship with his fishing buddy, Bill Donahue.
OK, we made that last part up.
We did, however, have a very special supersonic fly-by from the US Airforce Thunderbirds to help us celebrate our one-year anniversary!
Ok, fine. There was an airshow going on near by. Whatever.
But of course, before that we do the news just like we’ve been doing it FOR ONE WHOLE YEAR. This week in the headlines: Islam is of the Devil, Kentucky gets busted by a Federal Judge, no more holiday shit-storms in Washington, PZ Rescues Joe from a news story that is way over his head, women in Mali show us democracy in action, the Pope says some more dumb stuff and just like last year, we missed the Raelian love fest. Strangely, none of our wives were really all that disappointed.
Be sure to go to http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ and check out PZ’s blog! Do eeeet. Click the link. You’ll love it, I promise.
Stream this episode!
I’m actually one of the named plaintiffs who brought suit against the Kentucky legislation that shoved god into our department of Homeland Security. I wanted to clarify a couple of the points you brought up in your discussion about it. First of all, the reason it took three years to bring the suit was because nobody noticed that wording was in there for about three years. It was only after one of the local papers published an article on it, that we even knew that the wording was there. Riner kind of snuck it into the bill and the legislators in Kentucky never want to be seen to be anything but good Christians so Riner’s additions had very little opposition. Once we found out about it Edwin Kagin immediately started looking for people who were willing to sign on as plaintiffs. What was interesting and kind of crazy to me was that in order to successfully bring the lawsuit we actually had to show mental and/or physical harm from the law. Apparently, it could have been immediately thrown out if we had simply said it was unconstitutional without showing harm. So you had questioned whether a lawsuit actually had to be brought or whether someone could have said this is clearly unconstitutional and stopped it, but not only was it necessary to bring the lawsuit (after all this was part of an actual law passed by the Kentucky legislature) but it was also necessary to show actual harm. Because of this some of the claims of the plaintiffs do end up sounding kind of silly. Things like the law causing headaches, insomnia, and the like were particularly emphasized in the lawsuit just so we could meet the requirement that the law caused harm. I don’t think any of us were lying, but I was certainly emphasizing ill effects more than I would have otherwise.
Alex,
Thanks for taking the time to tell your story here, interesting to hear about the legal wrangling that has to go on just to protect from the intrusion of religious dogma into our legal system. I would personally like to thank you for aiding this case, I find it somewhat disturbing that when you have such a blatant violation that one would still have to “show harm”, “it’s unconstitutional” should be enough.