CREATIONISM'S MCCARTHYISTS

From Science After Sunclipse courtesy of Crooks and Liars:

Creation, Power and Violence

Open your mouth about evolution around the wrong people, though, and you can find yourself harassed, ejected from your job and even beaten in the street.

Just ask these people.

Steve Bitterman was an instructor who taught the Western Civilization course at Southwestern Community College in Red Oak, Iowa. In 2007, at the age of sixty, he was fired because he did not teach the story of Adam and Eve as literal truth.

And

Likewise, Richard Colling graduated from Olivet Nazarene University and taught there for twenty-seven years. A man of strong religious convictions, he argued that one could believe in the Christian God and still accept the scientific truth of evolution. In 2004, he published a book about this belief, and for his pains, he was barred from teaching general biology or having his book used in the school.

And

Paul Mirecki was professor of religious studies and department chair at the University of Kansas. He planned to teach a class called “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies,” but canceled those plans after two men beat him in the street one December morning. He had displayed an acerbic tongue in online discussion forums, and he later apologized for his less temperate remarks; neither that apology nor sympathy for a physically assaulted human being stayed the KU administration, who forced him to step down as department chair.

Much, much more here.

I suppose McCarthyism isn't quite the right metaphor to use here: that was all about intimidating people into shucking one bogus ideology, communism, in favor of another bogus ideology, capitalism and the "American Way," whatever that means. What the above excerpted blog post is talking about is embracing a bogus ideology over objective, verifiable, scientific truth. And I had no idea that things had gotten so bad, as if the existence of such a bullshit "controversy" in the first place wasn't bad enough.

That is, evolution is a scientific fact. As Carl Sagan once said in his badass PBS science show Cosmos, "it really happened." Any "controversy" about evolution must necessarily exist only within the minds of religious believers who are unable to find a way to make their supernatural cosmology compatible with natural, that is, real, cosmology. And that's it. End of story.

There is no public "controversy" over evolution. Only a bunch of weirdo fundamentalists insisting that everybody else buy their religious views without any evidence at all, in spite of, at this point, literal mountains of scientific evidence to the contrary. Nonetheless, it appears these weirdos have amassed enough power to put the squeeze on the individuals stuck on the front lines in this horrid culture war, teachers, who are a relatively easy target for various reasons.

This is some pretty sick shit. It forces teachers into choosing to either do their jobs honestly, or lying in order to feed their families. That's shitty. And the people making these bogus ideological attacks don't have to deal with the same real world issues as the people they victimize. That is, they can say any kind of crazy shit they want, and continue to get their paychecks because they're not teachers. Fucked, fucked, fucked.

At any rate, I had hoped the forces of fundamentalism were on the way out these days, given how badly fundamentalists have been feeling lately about how the GOP has been treating them. Guess I was wrong. Seems they've got a bunch of hot air left in their lungs.

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