PunkAssBlog.com

As I mentioned recently, I no longer have a day job in IT. But the truth of the matter is not that I quit to become a producer. In fact, I was fired because I claimed during a meeting that the movie The Matrix was fiction and stated it was extremely unlikely we’d ever actually lose a war against machines who would then turn us into batteries.

I know, I know, it is a movie, but you have to understand that there are some serious Matrix fans out there. A few of my coworkers were incensed that I would insult the story of their savior Neo by dismissing the possibility of his future coming. These Matrix fans informed my superiors, who determined that my insensitive views made me unfit to work closely with both humans and machines who might be believers.

…okay, that didn’t happen. But this did:

A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted.

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class Tuesday.

Sheesh. If I’d had any idea it was this easy to fire a professor with whom I disagreed, I would’ve cleared out a lot of the chaffe at UT — especially in the math department. It was so annoying when they told me that MY answers to the equations they presented were wrong. How dare they disrespect my belief that {k = 1}^n {2k - 1 = n^2 } was equal to {dx}x, you know?

Seriously, though, welcome to another sign of the coming intellectual apocalypse in America (or the Midwest, at least). It begins with teaching intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution during students’ early years under the guise of open discourse. Then we close discourse by preventing anyone from questioning the underpinnings of creationism in later studies, as done here in Iowa. Then we shoot all the scientists.

Okay, maybe there some steps in between those things, but not as many as you’d like to think.

Above: Albert Einstein teaches your innocent children about the Theory of Relativity.

And is it any surprise that the fundies use the threat of expensive legal action to force what is probably an underfunded community college to cow to their demands? Not only is this further proof that the Right is the true culture of frivolous lawsuits, it also helps explain why they enjoy emptying the wallets of our schools so much. When educational institutions lack the funds to fight back, they become much easier to bully.

Church groups and corporations could sue anyone they like into the stone age, and from Steve Bitterman’s perspective, they’d probably like that:

“I just thought there was such a thing as academic freedom here,” he said. “From my point of view, what they’re doing is essentially teaching their students very well to function in the eighth century.”

Ahh, the good old days — when peasants were god-fearing and taxation had never even heard of representation.

May not be long now…