"Backward Christian Soldiers!"


Limiting debate on Intelligent design
Kurt Anderson in New York Magazine makes many of the same points that The Questionable Authority did a couple of days ago (as I mentioned in this entry).

Why have I gotten so riled now? Because when and if, God forbid, the history of America’s theocratic transformation is written, these past few months will be seen as a turning point. When I read in June that the Discovery Institute, the Seattle think tank behind intelligent design, was premiering its new movie, The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe, at the Smithsonian, I literally moaned and shouted. In his inaugural Mass last spring, the new pope had included a sentence dissing evolution, but in July, Cardinal Schonborn, his close friend and doctrinal Kommandant, elaborated the Church’s aggressive new anti-Darwinism in a Times op-ed—an article placed, it turned out, through the offices of the Discovery Institute.

Then came August, when I discovered that Bill Gates’s foundation is a principal funder of the Discovery Institute (although not primarily its intelligent-design work). And watched the president say that the decision whether to teach evolutionary biology or faith-based pseudoscience should be made by local school districts, but that “both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about.” And watched Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the Harvard Medical School graduate, scramble onto the bandwagon. And then, depressingly, watched the hard-truth-telling maverick John McCain do the same. Finally, at the end of the month, the Times ran a friendly three-part series on intelligent design. The barbarians had breached the gate.

Bravo for noticing. But Mr, Anderson gets extra credit for this paragraph.

For several decades the philosophical ground has been softened up by the relativism and political correctness of the secular left, which succeeded in undermining the very idea of objective reality and of calling a spade a spade—so now, in the resulting marsh, fantasies like intelligent design (or Scientology or feng shui or 9/11 as a CIA plot) take root and spread like weeds. Liberals pioneered squishy-minded indulgence of their key constituencies’ unfortunate new ideas, like reparations and criminalized hate speech; now it’s the right’s turn.

That is something that I hope our liberal neighbors think about. If certain Christian fundamentalists are finagling the system to get what they want, it's because certain liberal flakes repeatedly showed that it could be done.

And of course this would all be academic if children weren't legally obligated to attend public schools.

Pun intended.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - October 11, 2005 at 06:10 AM  Tag


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