A roundup of recent Indiana newspaper editorials

Fines are fine, but law is necessary

It's an odd scenario, to say the least. A state agency has fined another state body over the State Fair stage collapse while state standards for building and inspecting such structures remain to be put into law.

Actions taken by the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration against the Indiana State Fair Commission and two private entities will continue to be debated, and in at least one case might wind up in court.

But the overshadowing issue is before the General Assembly: Unlike most states, Indiana does not require inspections of temporary outdoor structures on state property.

The collapse of the Sugarland stage rigging on Aug. 13 as a storm struck the Fairgrounds brought the deficiency to light in stark fashion. Seven people died and scores were injured.

As lawsuits flew and investigations ensued, legislators got to work across party lines. Senate Bill 273, setting standards for outdoor temporary structures and mandating inspections, breezed through the Senate, 45-5.

House passage is no lock. The measure's sponsor, Rep. Bob Cherry, R-Greenfield, says he's worried that a bill passed in haste might be inadequate to the need. It's the type of warning this Legislature loves to ignore; but there surely is time even in this short session for his concerns to be addressed.

Meanwhile, IOSHA and the fair commission find themselves taking preventive steps after an incident that an SB 273-type law might have prevented. To its credit, the commission quickly paid its $6,300 fine and will engage in IOSHA remedial training.

Of the two other parties found at fault, one, the stagehands' union, disputes its classification as an employer. The other, however, raises an objection that speaks to SB 273.

The company that built the stage wants a review of its $63,000 penalty, saying it warned the commission the stage should be evacuated if winds hit 40 mph. It cites a deposition in which the commission director says Sugarland refused to cancel. Again, a strong, clear law operating before the fact could have headed off these quarrels -- and perhaps the tragedy that led to them. If, heaven forbid, there's a next time, no one in leadership could say he wasn't warned.

- The Indianapolis Star | Feb. 13

C-minus for Congress looks like grade inflation

Congress recently received an overall grade of C-minus from 40 top academic experts who make it a habit to study that legislative body.

In the old days a C was considered average, so a C-minus would be slightly below average. And "slightly below average" is simply too high a grade for the poor-to-failing effort of the Congress in 2011.

The grade came from a survey conducted by the Center on Congress at Indiana University. Lee Hamilton, the former 34-year member of Congress from southern Indiana and director of the IU center, spoke for a lot of people when he suggested the grade was too high.

Intractable partisan behavior is one of those reasons. The House received an F and the Senate a D on a question about "keeping excessive partisanship in check." Bad grades on other questions showed the experts don't believe there is a proper level of consensus-seeking and compromise, or productive discussion, or good process in conducting business, or appropriate consideration of long-term implications of policy issues.

Comments by Ted Carmines, an IU political scientist who was lead author on the survey, also suggested he thought the overall grade was too high with this blunt criticism of Congress:

"Congress came close this year to total failure in its main functions of making laws and being a governing branch," he said. "That view wasn't shared by all the experts, but, overall, the grades are quite low. This was a severe assessment of Congress."

The grade inflation came in part because the experts gave Congress good grades on "making its workings and activities open to the public" and "making a good effort to be accessible to their constituents." In other words, they were good at showing people how inept they were and in meeting with people to try to explain themselves.

Hamilton, a true statesman during his three-plus decades in Congress, urged the public not to give up on trying to elect good people to serve. Deciding "they're all the same" would give in to the most partisan activists.

"That's really the worst reaction, because it increases the power of those who have brought us to this gridlock and stalemate," he said.

It may sound naive or like wishful thinking, but it would be far better for voters to become more educated about governance and politics. Be skeptical about ads and statements that demonize the other side. Be proactive in finding out how candidates feel about issues of importance to you. Try to determine how often the candidates have worked with people in the other party versus just following the party line. Ask them what they've done to bring truth and honesty to their campaign.

The partisanship and gridlock will continue if voters reward those who have thrown the most mud and those who choose party loyalty over independent thinking. If it does, that C-minus grade will surely continue to fall, as will the quality of public service coming out of Washington.

- The (Bloomington) Herald-Times | Feb. 12

Just can't let go of those spice sales?

When Lafayette banned the sale of an incense product that mimicked marijuana when smoked -- all the over-the-counter high without the criminal aftereffects -- the ordinance came with a warning label: This isn't the end of the story.

When Indiana made a similar move, cracking down on convenience store and head shop sales of the synthetic marijuana known as spice and a powdery substance called bath salts, the warning label was still there: To be updated.

The Indiana General Assembly is working on that this session, under Senate Bill 234, sponsored by Sen. Ron Alting, R-Lafayette. The bill would expand the number of chemical compounds covered by the law, as the state tries to keep up with the subtle adjustments manufacturers employ to keep their products just under the legal threshold and on store shelves.

Spice and bath salts and the rest of marketplace for drugs made from otherwise common goods (ahem, meth anyone?) always will be a big game of cat and mouse. We said as much when the city and state went into it in their own ways.

What's dumbfounding, though, is the apparent unwillingness of retailers to let go of the tidy profit made by pushing hallucinogens under innocuous names.

The state law seems to have just shoved the trade to backroom, under-the-counter, secret handshake territory.

Last week, Lafayette police raided a tobacco store on Teal Road, made two arrests and seized what they say was illegal packets of spice being sold to customers who could be trusted to keep the store's stash under wraps.

This is ridiculous. It shouldn't take a state law, updated on an annual basis, to keep legitimate businesses from selling this stuff.

- (Lafayette) Journal & Courier | Feb. 10

Keep religion out of science class

An uncertain fate remains for an Indiana Senate bill that would, if it were to become law, allow public schools to teach creationism and other origin-of-life theories in their classes. But this fight may have already been grounded.

The bill passed the state Senate last week by a 28-22 vote, but a committee chairman in the House of Representatives said Tuesday he may not move it forward because he believes it may be unworkable — unworkable not because he opposes teaching creationism but because many schools would not be able to teach the topic in the way the bill foresees.

In the beginning, the bill called for only the Christian creation story to be taught. An amendment widened that to include many, if not all, other religions' accounts of creation. The unworkable part seems to be that no single teacher could be knowledgeable enough to teach all of those accounts. (And, we wonder, how a teacher could ever have enough time to teach all those.)

The more important questions are how and why these battles are continually waged in the first place. Evolutionary theory has long thrived as the dominant paradigm in biology. One would think that — like heliocentrism (the sun being at the center of the universe with planets rotating around it) or the germ theory of disease — sooner or later evolution would take hold of the public imagination because of its basis in hard, validated science.

Yet the language of the recent Senate bill reflects the crux of the problem: "The governing body of a school corporation may offer instruction on various theories of the origin of life. The curriculum for the course must include theories from multiple religions, which may include, but is not limited to, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Scientology."

The problem inherent in that language is that the "origin of life" has little to do with evolutionary biology, which focuses on how species propagate and change over time.

There is little doubt the target of the bill is evolution, whose staunchest political and religious opponents display little interest in the teaching of good science, which should be a disinterested, peer-reviewed, religion-neutral process.

What many of them do have an interest in is peddling anti-evolutionary religious dogma. And as long as some fail to see the conflict between the methods of science and the goals of religion, the topic will not soon disappear.

At the same time, many enlightened religious denominations accept biological evolution as a natural process of God and consider it compatible with their faith.

Another concern is that poll data aren't comforting that evolution is now being well taught.

In 2011, the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers discovered that less than 30 percent of a sample of public school instructors made students aware of the evidence for evolution. The reasons for this may be manifold, but when so few Americans become literate in even the rudiments of science, it's unlikely they'll gain the skills to distinguish it from pseudoscience.

And, according to the Science and Engineering Readiness Index, developed at Florida State University, Indiana ranks among the nation's best in physics and calculus performance. Maybe requiring critical reasoning skills of legislators would protect the life sciences from uninformed tinkering.

Perhaps the solution, then, doesn't start with students. Finding more engaged instructors might be the first step. This could mean requiring prospective teachers to take coursework in evolutionary biology before setting foot in the classroom, or making them aware of court rulings such as Edwards v. Aguillard or Dover v. Kitzmiller that expressly forbid, by ruling unconstitutional, the entanglement of religion and science in the classroom.

Ours is a separation-of-church-and-state heritage, flowing from the First Amendment which forbids a theocracy — "an establishment of religion," in the amendment's words that seek to protect both the free practice of religion and the forced adoption of a religion. And from that follows this summary: Teach creationism in the churches. Teach science in the schools. And remember that creationism is a construct of belief and faith, not of science.

- (Terre Haute) Tribune-Star | Feb. 10