WTF Is The Matter With Kansas?

I was intending to use this quote from Nick Kristof in the Sunday Times:

In fact, when conservatives quote from the Bible to make moral points, they tend to quote very selectively. After all, while Leviticus bans gay sex, it also forbids touching anything made of pigskin (is playing football banned?) - and some biblical passages seem not so much morally uplifting as genocidal.

and just note that several million trees had died so "Sky Appears Blue" could appear in the Paper of Record. But, what the hell, let's think about it. It's absurd that this mild schoolyard retort is mentioned; it ought to be common knowledge among even the most rabid of fundamentalists. But of course it isn't, and it's a measure of the particular straits we're in that it must pass for liberal commentary just to say that much. I could care less whether Fat Tony Scalia buggers his wife, but anytime Dobson or Falwell or Rick Santorum starts ranting about gay marriage they should be asked, point blank, where they banish their wives and daughters when Mr. Monthly comes to call. You don't? Then the argument's over.

But it doesn't work that way, do it? And it is, in a sense, a form of Christian persecution which really is going on in this country. Decent Christians who don't believe their religion is a justification for hatred and bigotry get tarred with that brush every day.

It is, simply, an obscenity that at the beginning of the 21st century the Kansas Board of Education would want to "debate" the science of the 19th. But what's worse is that the same sort of thing is at work here: the rabid fundamentalists get to state their case without being questioned on it. "Intelligent Design" is not just a smokescreen for the forcible insertion of Biblical literalism into school biology texts; it's a pretext for attacking materialism itself.

And I was educated in the last century, though if I live a few more years that may become a badge of honor rather than an admission of being behind the times. At the time it seemed quite clear: science was materialistic not because science insisted on, or relied upon, an absolute belief in materialism. It was materialistic because, if we were to know anything, the measurable was the only way we could possibly know it. The battle of Kansas is about giving supernatural explanations equal footing with real science, plain and simple. But the crypto-Creationists will not be called upon to defend that position.

Steve Case, chairman of the Kansas Science Curriculum Standards Committee, wrote a response to a Wichita Eagle editorial by the Board's chairman, Steve Abrams, which was read into the record on the final day of the show trial hearings. He said:

Dr Abrams ends his letter with a quote from Thomas Cooper;"only fraud and falsehood dread examination. Truth invites it." I would suggest that he be careful what he wishes for.

Insertion of a particular set of fundamentalist beliefs into science curriculum cannot be the end of it, as the crypto-Creationists know. The next step will be removing supernatural explanations from rationalist critique. It's something Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias might want to consider carefully before bargaining with other peoples' "unpopular" rights.