Henderson Monkey Trial?
The third rail of the right wing evangelical republican agenda is targeted at stopping the teaching of evolution in public schools and to replace it with creationism which is presently being marketed to fundamentalist Christians as intelligent design theory. The other two issues they have forced on politicians and the public is getting rid of the separation of Church and State by instituting their form of Christianity into government and laws that deny choice to women and civil rights to gay people. The reasoning for the latest push to rid public schools of the theory of evolution is they and the bush administration, don’t believe in science. A perfect example is bush’s denial of global warming, environmental issues and evolution. Forty three states have already begun taking school boards to court to require that creationism be taught. Of course, the mother of all court cases on evolution was in Tennessee in 1925, the Scopes monkey trial. The Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that teaching creationism in public schools was unconstitutional but that doesn’t stop the fundamentalists. To say that evolution is invalid and that creationist religion should be taught in public schools is like saying Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is just a theory or that the sun rotates around the earth rather than visa versa as just a theory. Copernicus and many scientists throughout history have been persecuted by the Church and religious zealots who are afraid of things they don’t understand. We are beginning to repeat many of the same mistakes from our history because we have leaders who ignorantly lead gullible people astray. Maybe we should canvas our local school board and politicians to see what they believe about these issues before we get in the middle of a crisis. Many fundamentalists visit Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, Florida and believe the garbage they espouse as science. They state that in the not so distant past, dinosaurs and humans roamed the planet together and that the earth is only a few thousand years old. There is a whole industry of bogus scientists who travel the right wing political and religious circuit on radio and TV who claim these and many other unscientific lies. We should not allow our community to be deceived by these false prophets and political snake oil salesmen. We are close to this crisis today. Principles of science are not up for popular vote. Don’t allow it to discredit our good public school system. If evangelicals want to teach religion rather than science in school, go to a private Christian school but don’t try to change the public school system into your own personal religious propaganda machine.