The Arbiters of Faith: Legislative Assembly of BC Entanglement with Religious Dogma Resulting from Legislative Prayer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Daily sittings of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia (BC), Canada begin with a prayer or reflection delivered by a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA). MLAs have the option of using a sample prayer from a list of five provided by Legislative staff, or of delivering a prayer of their own devising. The Office of the Clerk is currently revising the list of sample prayers to include a greater diversity of beliefs. To accomplish this task, bureaucrats face a number of practical and constitutional challenges. This article explores these challenges. The Office of the Clerk will have to first identify religious and belief groups that are present in BC, then select a reasonable number of those groups to include on the list, and finally identify prayers and reflections that are representative of those traditions. Each of these steps raises practical questions with respect to how bureaucrats can actually make these decisions, and to more fundamental questions regarding the appropriateness of the decisions made. Given these challenges, this paper concludes that the practice of offering sample prayers should be avoided, and that MLAs should be called upon to deliver prayers and reflections of their own devising, or that legislative prayer be abolished.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".