[Mb-civic] Dark Ages Primary - Harold Meyerson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Dark Ages Primary

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, August 31, 2005; Page A23

What I want to know is, who walked the Earth first: the dinosaurs or 
Strom Thurmond?

It seems that the advocates of fast-forward "intelligent design" -- the 
folks who, by totaling up the biblical begats, believe that the universe 
was created in 4004 B.C. -- are erecting mini-theme-parks that feature 
secondhand dinosaur sculptures they've acquired in their scavengings. By 
putting such Tyrannosaurus Wrecks on display, they mean to prove to the 
public that people and dinosaurs once roamed the world together, just as 
their biblical time-clock and that old Raquel Welch movie clearly 
demonstrated.

Silly stuff, certainly, but at the rate we're going, it may make it into 
the 2008 or 2012 Republican platform. Now that the president has 
endorsed intelligent design, the social conservatives and religious 
zealots who constitute an ever larger and louder wing of the Republican 
base have been emboldened in their crusades for fundamentalist values 
and against any science whose findings and methods run counter to their 
beliefs.

School districts throughout the Bible Belt (and yes, it's time to start 
resurrecting the coinages of H.L. Mencken, scourge extraordinaire of 
early 20th-century Bible-Belt boobs) are busy demoting Darwinism to 
history's dustbin. In late September, a Harrisburg, Pa., court will hear 
yet another in a seemingly endless string of cases in which a local 
school board has sought to compel high school science teachers to point 
out the religious errors in the theory of evolution. The court will 
doubtless rule against the school board. But now that the president 
himself has said that intelligent design should be part of the 
curriculum, too (which gives a whole new, afterlife-specific meaning to 
the notion of No Child Left Behind), such school board creationism 
probably will expand exponentially.

After all, recent polling shows that just 35 percent of Americans 
believe that evolution is supported by evidence, while another 35 
percent believe it is not.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/30/AR2005083001553.html?nav=hcmodule
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