Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks
(By Mariah Blake, Washington Monthly, January/February 2010)

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters.
Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan"he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

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In 1994 the Texas Republican Party, which had just been taken over by the religious right, enlisted Robert Offutt, a conservative board member who was instrumental in overhauling the health textbooks, to recruit like-minded candidates to run against the board’s moderate incumbents. At the same time, conservative donors began pouring tens of thousands of dollars into local school board races. Among them were Wal-Mart heir John Walton and James Leininger, a hospital-bed tycoon whose largess has been instrumental in allowing religious conservatives to take charge of the machinery of Texas politics. Conservative groups, like the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum, also jumped into the fray and began mobilizing voters.

Part of the newcomers’ strategy was bringing bare-knuckle politics into what had been low-key local races. In the run-up to the 1994 election, Leininger’s political action committee, Texans for Governmental Integrity, sent out glossy flyers suggesting that one Democratic incumbent"a retired Methodist schoolteacher and grandmother of five"was a pawn of the “radical homosexual lobby” who wanted to push steroids and alcohol on children and advocated in-class demonstrations on “how to masturbate and how to get an abortion!” The histrionics worked, and the group quickly picked off a handful of Democrats. The emboldened bloc then set its sights on Republicans who refused to vote in lockstep. “Either you’d hippity-hop, or they would throw whatever they could at you,” says Cynthia A. Thornton, a conservative Republican and former board member, who refers to the bloc as “the radicals.”

It took more than a decade of fits and starts, but the strategy eventually paid off. After the 2006 election, Republicans claimed ten of fifteen board seats. Seven were held by the ultra-conservatives, and one by a close ally, giving them an effective majority. Among the new cadre were some fiery ideologues; in her self-published book, Cynthia Dunbar of Richmond rails against public education, which she dubs “tyrannical” and a “tool of perversion,” and says sending kids to public school is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames.” (More recently, she has accused Barack Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer and suggested he wants America to be attacked so he can declare martial law.) Then in 2007 Governor Rick Perry appointed Don McLeroy, a suburban dentist and longstanding bloc member, as board chairman. This passing of the gavel gave the faction unprecedented power just as the board was gearing up for the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting standards for every subject.

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Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly four billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation. McLeroy and company had also hoped to require science textbooks to address the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, including evolution. Scientists see the phrase, which was first slipped into Texas curriculum standards in the 1980s, as a back door for bringing creationism into science class. But as soon as news broke that the board was considering reviving it, letters began pouring in from scientists around the country, and science professors began turning out en masse to school board hearings.
During public testimony, one biologist arrived at the podium in a Victorian-era gown, complete with a flouncy pink bustle, to remind her audience that in the 1800s religious fundamentalists rejected the germ theory of disease; it has since gained near-universal acceptance. All this fuss made the bloc’s allies skittish, and when the matter finally went to the floor last March, it failed by a single vote.

But the struggle did not end there. McLeroy piped up and chided his fellow board members, saying, “Somebody’s gotta stand up to [these] experts!” He and his allies then turned around and put forward a string of amendments that had much the same effect as the “strengths and weaknesses” language. Among other things, they require students to evaluate various explanations for gaps in the fossil record and weigh whether natural selection alone can account for the complexity of cells. This mirrors the core arguments of the intelligent design movement: that life is too complex to be the result of unguided evolution, and that the fossil evidence for evolution between species is flimsy. The amendments passed by a wide margin, something McLeroy counts as a coup. “Whoo-eey!” he told me. “We won the Grand Slam, and the Super Bowl, and the World Cup! Our science standards are light years ahead of any other state when it comes to challenging evolution!” Scientists are not so enthusiastic. My last night in Texas, I met David Hillis, a MacArthur Award"winning evolutionary biologist who advised the board on the science standards, at a soul-food restaurant in Austin. “Clearly, some board members just wanted something they could point to so they could reject science books that don’t give a nod to creationism,” he said, stabbing his okra with a fork. “If they are able to use those standards to reject science textbooks, they have won and science has lost.”

...These guys ARE NOT ignorant. ...They try to factually take and twist the evidence of science to support their "Poofistic" world. Its really sad but some of the best hucksterism is represented by these Creation "scientists". NOw, of course , there are many real douche bags with degrees from butt-lick school ....

He likes American Fooball because its more cerebral than soccer.

With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey

“Whoo-eey!” he told me. “We won the Grand Slam, and the Super Bowl, and the World Cup! Our science standards are light years ahead of any other state when it comes to challenging evolution!”

After 400 years, the CAtholic Church realizes that they fucked up when it came to Galileo---ALERT THE MEDIA

Quote:

How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks
(By Mariah Blake, Washington Monthly, January/February 2010)

But the struggle did not end there. McLeroy piped up and chided his fellow board members, saying, “Somebody’s gotta stand up to [these] experts!”

If, as a child, you practice Catholicism, You have no sin. If, as an adult you practice Catholicism, you have no brain.

An adult can be without sin.