The Columbus Dispatch published its 27th story about the John Freshwater case last Saturday.

It’s mainly about how one student told investigators one thing last year and then told a much different story this week while under oath. Given that his story changed in ways that were beneficial to Freshwater, I wonder to what extent community pressure may have been a factor.

IMHO, this student’s testimony really doesn’t matter much one way or the other. The well-documented acts and comments of Freshwater himself and his supporters as reported in the entry I posted on June 22, 2008 and elsewhere seem to me to be enough to remove him from the classroom.

You can learn more about the dangers of leaving him in the classroom from an excellent essay that Rob Boston posted last May 8.

Bottom Line: Religion tends to be *extremely* provocative and inflammatory. It has set people at each other’s throats for centuries. When a teacher openly brings his or her personal religious views into a public school classroom, it’s like striking a match while filling a car at a gas station. It’s not only not necessary for the process you’re there for – it’s dangerous in ways that Freshwater and his supporters seem terribly ignorant of.

The fact that this silly little story from a small Ohio town has received so much attention over so many months is just one indication of the outsized emotions religion tends to generate. It reminds me of the long and overheated debate over Ohio’s motto (“With God All Things Are Possible”) that immediately preceded the start of this diary. The Freshwater case and the motto debate – like so many of the debates associated with religion – seem to me to be gratuitous and divisive things that distract us from far more important issues.

Getting lots of people all worked up over extremely minor issues is perhaps one of the least commented upon negative consequences of religion, yet it might be one of the worst and most widespread when you consider all the time and energy they waste and all the unnecessary conflict and hatred they spread….

It wouldn’t have to be this way. We could as a society recognize that religion is a hot topic on par with sex and can only be brought into our schools in carefully controlled ways. Religion could be objectively dealt with in comparative religion classes the same way sex is objectively dealt with in health classes. Math and science teachers who attempt to seduce students into embracing their religious views would be treated like math and science teachers who attempt to seduce students sexually. Endless debates over whether or not a specific teacher was right or wrong to attempt to seduce a student theologically would be as rare as endless debates over whether or not a specific teacher was right or wrong to attempt to get a student to go to bed with him or her.

But of course that’s not the kind of society we have, is it?

If it were, I don’t think math and science teachers would be vehemently defending their right to display a Bible on their desks any more than they would be defending their right to display The Joy of Sex on their desks. Neither is appropriate.

Personally, I’d find The Joy of Sex much less offensive. After all, it doesn’t defend slavery, advocate genocide, distort history and science in wildly absurd ways, or inspire nightmares about Doomsday or eternal hellfire. And as far as I know, it hasn’t inspired a single war, hate crime, or witch burning. Yet I bet many of the good Christian citizens of Mount Vernon would be outraged if they discovered that Mr. Freshwater had shared a single anatomically correct drawing from it with his students.

I also have to wonder how quickly they would have jumped to his defense had he displayed a Koran on his desk or a Satanic Bible (let alone a holy penis representation of the Hindu gOd, Shiva).

In my experience, Christians tend to defend freedom of religion only as long as they’re debating secularists and atheists. When their bullying tactics win them that debate and only theists are left on the field, the issue suddenly becomes a matter of defending believers in the one true gOd against those who believe in false gOds. And when *that* debate drives minority Hindus and Muslims and Jews from the field, the fight transforms into one between the TRUE lovers and interpreters of Jesus and those evil agents and dupes of Satan who call themselves Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons, or whatever the favored scapegoat of the moment happens to be. We find enough of this sort of thing occurring in the world at large; we can go a long way to keeping it out of our schools by insisting that teachers keep their religious views completely to themselves.

And yes, I would apply the same standard to atheist teachers. Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith have no more business being on the desk of a science teacher than the Bible does.

And as I’ve said before, I’d apply the same standards to other areas of life that have nothing to do with religion but also have no business in the classroom. If Freshwater had been an ardent Obama supporter who had decided to put a “Yes We Can” poster on the front of his desk, I’d want to see him told to remove that, too. Same thing if he used classroom time or space to promote his brother’s Chevy dealership. The professional standards I’m advocating apply across the board.

Science teachers are hired to teach science – not save souls, or elect presidents, or sell cars. If they can’t or won’t perform the tasks they promised to perform when they signed their contract with a school district, they need to find themselves another job.

Why is this so hard for so many defenders of “absolute morality” to understand?