Why does being a Republican party member have such a strong correlation with this kind of nonsense? I know that there are reasonable Republicans out there: why aren't you loudly shouting down the lunatic wing of your party?
To which I responded:
Hey, I'm shouting! OK, I am not technically a Pach, being registered as an Independent, but I am a conservative. Fair cop, though. As far as I can see, pols who are, or who pander to, Christian fundies are invariably Republicans. And while it is true that chunks of the left are as lousy with their own brand of anti-science obscurantism as the right, a good many (if not most) of the critics of the anti-science left are lefties themselves. Good topic - think I'll bring it up on my site. (All the righties I personally know shout about this, but I can only think of a few examples of public criticism by righties with a wider reading audience.)
I have come up with a few more exceptions I'm aware of, but I think in general that what I said is true, at least regarding the issues I obsess about. (Or it could be my assumptions about political affiliation are completely mistaken.) Perhaps one or two of my six readers has some thoughts?
Mr. Bradley of Lex Communis approaches from another angle, and has a fair point that, exasperating though creationists are, they're hardly the only, or the worst, players in the your children/my values free-for-all of public education. I do have an obligation to alert my readers to the fact that Peter Sean is a Catholic and a lawyer, ergo a doubly evil man and likely a closet Taliban. (Scroll down to ""Evolution in the News - Neanderthals and Georgia" if the permalink fails.)
Fair point, as I said, but I have to disagree on the level of specifics and practicalities. I'm not averse to some "social control" via funding, as a matter of not pouring public monies into fourth-rate science education. I'm all for rigorous standards, which would translate into valuable class time being given over to the study of photosynthesis, not to the "alternative hypotheses" of an ID guest-lecturer. The real issue here, to me, is not about evolution or world views but about letting people who don't know what they're talking about determine curricula in school subjects. Thinking about it simply in "culture wars" terms is not quite on the mark. Elementary and high school biology classes - even advanced classes in good schools - are not going to be at a level where that parent-angering insinuation of metaphysical materialism should be anywhere in sight. (Unless Teach is given to bloviating ahead of grade-level.) Letting people like Superintendent Cox have a say-so in teaching biology is less urgently a First Amendment problem (though it is that, too), and more urgently a problem comparable to, say, letting fuzzy theorists wreck design childrens' reading programs.
A teacher, for example, haranguing and bullying students over "incorrect" opinion, in the guise of a history class, is a real problem - and should be addressed and corrected for what it is. But a more serious issue is that of students who are not really being taught any history at all. That the two problems may be correlated doesn't mean that fixing the former will in itself have any effect on the latter. While it should go without saying that science classes should be strictly science classes, it is also true that completely and finally settling the hash of importuning creationists isn't going to magically make mickey-mouse biology classes rigorous, or address the more fundamental problem that Johnny can't make change, let alone handle basic algebra. And the general dumbing-down of curricula is not a development that can be laid at the feet of those awful fundies, even if they are answerable in part for the dumbing down of biology. (I note in passing that the reason I got a decent grounding in biology and proper exposure to evolutionary theory was precisely because, not in spite of, the fact that my parents sent me to a religiously-affiliated schools and not the local secular public school. Can't say they were successful in getting me to pay any attention to the theology, but the biology did sink in.)
Addenda: Dudes, it's Darwinism that's the root cause of terror. In case you were wondering.
Kimberly Swygert posts on the debate over science education in California. Do read the first comment - well said. (Only one there so far as of this posting.)