Got to keep the loonies on the path

I'll have a great deal to say tomorrow about my current University's decision to dump their racist mascot tomorrow. Needless to say, I'm in favor. For today, some good news on why we will actually win the science wars, if none of the current military ones.

Kansas is something of an interesting state, deeply red and somewhat famous for having something the matter with it. It's also home to one of the most impressive fossil beds in the country, one that proves that the middle of the USA was under water eons ago. Politically, the state has been undergoing an evolution. The governor, Kathleen Sebelius is a moderately conservative Democrat who has made a cottage industry out of convincing moderate Republicans to switch parties and run as Republicans, including the current attorney general (who soundly defeated the wingnut opponent described in the linked article), and the former chairman of the state Republican party. It went little noticed during the landslide election of November, but voters also elected a slate of Democrats and moderate Republicans to replace the crazy religious kooks on the state board of education. As a result, the infamous anti-evolution science standards adopted in 2005 are now history. From The Guardian:

In a 6-4 vote on Tuesday night, the Kansas state board of education deleted language from teaching guidelines that challenged the validity of evolutionary theory, and approved new phrasing in line with mainstream science.

It was seen as a victory for a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats, science educators and parents who had fought for two years to overturn the earlier guidelines.

The decision is the latest in a string of defeats for proponents of creationism, and its modern variant, intelligent design. It reverses the decision taken by the same authorities two years ago to include language undermining Darwinism - on the insistence of conservative parents and activists in the intelligent design movement.

This is very good news all around. It's been noted that the Republican party has both a long-term and short-term crisis on its hands. Going into 2008, they are squarely on the hook for the Iraq war, and unable to convincingly blame anyone else for their mess. Today's vote in the House of Representatives may have been on a non-binding resolution, but several Republicans just made their races in 2008 much tougher. Chris Shays, the last Republican Congressman left in New England, may have just created an all blue region of the country by voting for against the resolution, and thus for the surge. Ditto several Republicans in NY and PA. In the longer term, however, the R's may be just as screwed. They rely on an uneasy alliance between business oriented economic conservatives, who they've been pissing off by being generally as incompetent with regard to the economy as they are with foreign policy, and the religious right, who are basically the only people left in the country who still support the president and the war. Without business groups and their cash, you end up with a vocal group of lunatics running the show who will start to alienate a great deal of the American population. I'm not confident the Democrats are fully ready to take advantage, but at least they are now showing some sporadic signs of life, though they still could show more courage on some politically charged issues.

As an example of the wingnuts who will hopefully be Left Behind soon (it's a pun, get it?), we turn to some Republican state legislators in Georgia and Texas. Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges recently sent out this um, er, uhh, "interesting" FYI to his colleagues around the country:

“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” reads the letter that went out under Bridges' name. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

As these kind of screeds go, it's basically three-for-three. Anti-Semitic, as I can only assume that "Pharisees" means Jews in this context. Anti-science just on its face....and to top it off, as anti-English grammar as any document I've ever seen. Seriously, read that quote again. Amazingly enough, a Texas legislator, Warren Chisum, the Texas House Appropriations chair, decided this would be a good thing to forward along, and sent it to all his colleagues. From Talking Points Memo, the inevitable reaction:

The ADL caught wind of the Bridges memo and now Chisum says he's "willing to apologize if I've offended anyone" if anyone got their big nose bent out of shape.

Reports the Dallas Morning News: "Mr. Chisum said he hadn't looked at the Web site and didn't realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn't vet the material more carefully."

No S#!t, Sherlock. It's generally a good idea to, you know, like read these things before you pass them along. Somehow, neither legislator managed to realize that the website from which the great Big Bang/Pharisee/Kabbala conspiracy theory originated has another rather..."fringe position"...

Barnes' memo [ed. note: the one forwarded by Bridges and Chisum] pointed fellow state legislators to the information at fixedearth.com which rails against the “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism” and claims that “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.” They've even caught on to the "centuries-old conspiracy" on the part of Jewish physicists to destroy Christianity.

Yup, us crazy Jews and our embrace of the Heliocentric model of the solar system!?! My Sweet Lord, these people are absolutely bats#it insane, and these are state legislators in positions of real power. Just imagine the crazier people who are voting for them...