Our Views for June 24, 2008

• Published: Jun 24, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 am

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Gov. Bobby Jindal ought to veto the neo-creationism bill that is now heading to his desk. The practical matter is that he won’t.

Yet we fear that its passage will be, sooner as well as later, an embarrassment for the state of Louisiana.

The so-called Louisiana Science Education Act is on its face a defense of academic freedom but is in reality pushed by advocates of Bible-based notions of creation and the formation of life on Earth. The open advocates of creationism have a new tack: It’s a right of teachers to explore all theories in the classroom and “update” science teaching with “supplemental” material.

Right. If that’s the case, the bill is unnecessary. Legislators ignored extensive testimony from science teachers and other experts in opposition to the bill.

More is at work here, and the lopsided legislative majorities voting for the bill know what the disingenuous supporters of it won’t admit: It’s a stalking horse for pushing religious material in science classrooms.

In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that mandated “equal treatment” of creationism when evolution was taught in public school classrooms. Today’s bill by Sen. Ben Nevers, D-Bogalusa, is the old argument in a slightly different form.

We believe the signing of this bill will be a particular problem for Jindal.

After all, he’s courting major businesses to come to Louisiana, including major white-collar employers. We hope he will be successful in this effort, and he might be even when national news focuses on this outbreak of Elmer Gantry legislation. Yet this sort of foolishness doesn’t help.

The economic development business is focused on the “creative class” of knowledge workers who are the seeds for new businesses of the future. How many of them will be attracted to a state that cannot reconcile itself to the legitimacy of the theory of evolution?

The governor was not at his best on this subject recently on “Face the Nation.” Even by our talkative governor’s standards, Jindal gave a long-winded and round-about answer to his CBS interviewer that was strikingly unpersuasive in its unwillingness to say “yes” or “no” about the bill.

The best Jindal could do was suggest that state and federal government should not be in the business of school curricula.

That is a decent enough argument, except that the horse is out of the barn: The state buys textbooks and sets standards for teaching and testing. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education sets criteria for the accountability program. The state is taking over and running many failing schools.

State involvement in education is deep in Louisiana, more so than in many states. The Jindal argument might sound plausible on national television to audiences who don’t know the score in Louisiana, but it’s divorced from the Louisiana reality.