Bad as things look, they could be worse.

You could be living in Louisiana, where a creation-science encouraging measure is the law of the land.

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But I highly recommend this article about a brainy 19-year-old Louisiana native, now studying history at Rice, who’s leading a charge to repeal the law. He earlier succeeded in a fight against an effort to remove real science textbooks from public school classes. His repeal appeal has been signed by 76 Nobel laureates. Not that this impresses your average Louisiana Republican legislator (or ours).

If nothing else, enjoy the story of young Zack Kopplin.

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And don’t take our current lack of a creation science law for granted. The idea pops up from the fringe every session. And sure to come this year is a Republican-favored idea for school vouchers. Kopplin warns:

He also has his eyes set on vouchers. After an Alternet story came out about a school in the Louisiana voucher program teaching that the Loch Ness Monster was real and disproved evolution, Kopplin looked deeper into the program and found that this wasn’t just one school, but at least 19 other schools, too.

School vouchers, he argues, unconstitutionally fund the teaching of creationism because many of the schools in these programs are private fundamentalist religious schools who are teaching creationism.

“These schools have every right to teach whatever they want — no matter how much I disagree with it — as long as they are fully private,” he says. “But when they take public money through vouchers, these schools need to be accountable to the public in the same way that public schools are and they must abide by the same rules.” Kopplin is hoping for more transparency in these programs so the public can see what is being taught with taxpayers’ money.

The Billionaire Boys Club view, of course, is that parents and schools should be unleased with tax money to teach whatever they want, removed from state Board of Education regulation and put under the care of Republican legisaltors.

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Watch a creationist Louisiana senator insult advocates of teaching science in science classes, rather than religion:

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