Photo by Daniel Mayer, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Oklahoma's Senate Bill 140 (PDF), which would have empowered science denial in the classroom, died in committee on March 2, 2023, when the deadline for Senate bills to be reported from committee passed.
Styled "the Oklahoma Science Education Act," the bill would have ostensibly provided Oklahoma's teachers with the right to help students "understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught," while prohibiting state and local administrators from exercising supervisory responsibility.
No particular theories were identified as controversial, but a string of similar bills in the Oklahoma legislature — most recently Senate Bills 613 and 662 in 2021, which died in committee in the same year — were clearly aimed specifically at evolution.
