What's the Matter with Kansas?

The great conservative push to put American education under the thumb of religious orthodoxy is off and running in Topeka, Kansas, today, as that state's Board of Education, dominated by people more impressed by superstition than science, launches a "hearing" on whether evolution shouldn't be officially undermined in all that state's schools by creationism, which is being carefully marketed as a pseudo-science called "intelligent design."

It's a rigged hearing. The conservatives on the Kansas Bd. of Ed. out-number their opponents 6-4, and they've set this up as a kind of "state trial" of evolution. And actual scientists have obliged them by deciding to boycott the whole enterprise (though the first article linked above says scientists are getting more militant about combatting the forces of ignorance trying to railroad American education).

"Intelligent design," said paleontologist Leonard Krishtalka, "is nothing more than creationism in a cheap tuxedo."

The movement pushing "intelligent design" set out to undermine evolution in a slightly more subtle fashion than did the courthouse-square preachers of the 1920s, but their purpose is precisely the same: to cow scientific consensus to the will of religious orthodoxy. They mask their agenda under the "reasonable" proposition that they are debating unproven theories, but their agenda isn't education at all: it's more Terri Schiavo-ism, the political correctness of the Christian Right.