Jewish Student Finds Ten Commandments Offensive

The following testimony took place on 10/29/08—this article relies on the official hearing transcript for details of the testimony.

The student—testifying in a hearing that will determine if his former teacher keeps his job—said that the teacher kept two copies of the Ten Commandments displayed in the classroom. “I didn’t like being in that classroom and being Jewish,” James Hoeffgen said.

Hoeffgen said that there were other items in the classroom that he deemed to be “Christian” but the Ten Commandments was the only item he could name or describe.

The student—a high school senior during the time of his testimony—was called as a witness by the school board in the hearing for Mount Vernon, Ohio, eighth grade science teacher John Freshwater. The hearing began in October of 2008 and has yet to be completed.

Freshwater removed the Ten Commandments from his classroom when requested to do so, in writing, by school administration.

Hoeffgen said that the topics Freshwater covered in class included the age of things. “[W]e were taught such things such as the earth may have been around for only a few thousand years,” Hoeffgen said, “and that carbon dating was inaccurate and things like dinosaurs lived with humans and, for instance, the Loch Ness Monster existed still today.”

One of the handouts he received in class was titled “Survival of the Fakest,” Hoeffgen said. He said that handout, or another handout, contained information about faked drawings of animal embryos that originated in the 1800’s—the handout said that the drawings were still being used in textbooks.

There was an article published in the Dec2000/Jan2001 of American Spectator with the same title and that covered the same subject that Hoeffgen described. (For those that have access to OhioLink, here is the article “Survival of the Fakest” from American Spectator.)

Freshwater never used the words “Intelligent Design” or “Creationism,” Hoeffgen said.

Hoeffgen said he believed that some of the things being taught in class were based out of Christianity. He said he did pass his proficiency test for science.