Now, nobody's likely to take issue with the idea of "science education." Nor is the bill's specific wording offensive on its face. The act allows teachers to bring supplemental materials into the classroom to promote "critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning" -- never mind that any decent school should be promoting those things already.

It's what the bill doesn't say that has prompted criticism by, among others, the New York Times editorial page and one of Jindal's own biology professors at Brown University, who spoke on behalf of the Louisiana Coalition for Science.

The bill never mentions that evolution is almost universally accepted among scientists as the basis for modern biology.

And it skips right over the key fact that the effort is backed by the same archconservatives who've trying to force religiously based doubts over the theory, either in the form of creationism or its successor "intelligent design," into science classrooms for years now.

Those efforts have been consistently rejected by the courts, which explains another artful bit of misdirection: The bill explicitly disavows the promotion of any particular set of religious beliefs. That directly contradicts the goal of its most ardent supporters, including the Louisiana Family Forum, which in and of itself should raise plenty of questions over just what was going on here.

Still, the obfuscation made it hard to argue the merits of the bill, and in the end, even many of the lawmakers who knew better threw up their hands and voted yes.