Check out this gratuitous and just bizarre reference to academic freedom and evolution in a New York Times article about religion-based arbitration. It concerns a young man, Nicklaus Ellison, who tragically died of a toxic drug combination after going to live in a Christian substance-abuse treatment center. The article is long and interesting and has nothing to do with evolution. Yet note the sentence in bold:

Like his mother, Mr. Ellison was a committed Christian, but he was never comfortable in church, his family said. He loved to write songs and poems. He had long bangs and was rarely without his Pok�mon hat. But when he drank, they said, he could become violent and out of control.

Mr. Ellison was also openly gay — something his friends said was not easy in Knoxville public high school, where teachers were allowed to question evolution. “I was scared for him to be so open about it,” said his friend Emily Kinser. “But I was also so proud of him.”

Friends and family said Mr. Ellison drank and took drugs to escape the pressures of not fitting in. “Society is telling him he’s not right,” said Ms. Kinser. “He felt unwanted.”

The logic seems to be that Ellison faced potential anti-gay harassment associated with “allowing” teachers to “question evolution.” What the –?

Knoxville is in Tennessee, which passed an academic freedom law in 2012. Yes, the law “allows” teachers to present mainstream scientific research raising questions about evolutionary theory, alongside information supportive of it as per existing science standards. It also protects teachers from retaliation if they encourage critical thinking about climate change, human cloning, or other controversial scientific topics.

A life cut short as Nicklaus Ellison’s was likely included many sources of pain — but what does “questioning evolution” have to do with any of that? Obviously, nothing whatsoever.

So what were reporters Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-Greenberg thinking? Probably, science-based reasons for questioning evolution are something they know little about. For them, I would guess skepticism about Darwinian theory functions as a sort of synecdoche — part for the whole — the whole being a worldview that, in their view, affirms traditional Christianity and intolerance of gay people. “Folks in Knoxville,” goes this understanding, “are so backward they even ‘allow’ teachers to ‘question evolution’!”

The complacent ignorance and bigotry compacted into that one sentence in the Times is remarkable. It goes to show yet again that in privileged media circles, evolution is a subject that, like intelligent design, you can say almost anything about no matter how far from the truth and expect to get away with it.

An irony here is that whatever pressures gays once felt to remain closeted, the closest analogy today would be to the persecution faced by evolution skeptics. In liberal academic and media contexts, “coming out” as a Darwin doubter typically means career suicide. Skeptics prudently keep their secret to themselves.

Image credit: Geoff Livingston (Flickr: The New York Times Building), [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.