Creationists Change Tactics in - Where Else? - Texas

You gotta admire them, I guess. Stupid people just never quit.

The proponents of replacing science with a single set of religious beliefs - iow, creationists - have lost every court battle to force schools to teach Christian religion instead of evolution. Now, in Texas where what goes into the nation's schoolbooks is decided, they have changed their strategy. Instead of trying to force a substitution to evolution or at least a co-equal spot for creationism in the educational system, they're attacking evolution itself by insisting that its "strengths and weaknesses" be taught. The strengths, of course, will be downplayed while the so-called weaknesses will be an excuse for bringing in creationist arguments that evolution is "flawed".

The “strengths and weaknesses” language was slipped into the curriculum standards in Texas to appease creationists when the State Board of Education first mandated the teaching of evolution in the late 1980s. It has had little effect because evolution skeptics have not had enough power on the education board to win the argument that textbooks do not adequately cover the weaknesses of evolution.

Yet even as courts steadily prohibited the outright teaching of creationism and intelligent design, creationists on the Texas board grew to a near majority. Seven of 15 members subscribe to the notion of intelligent design, and they have the blessings of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican.

What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas: the state is one of the country’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are loath to produce different versions of the same material. The ideas that work their way into education here will surface in classrooms throughout the country.

“ ‘Strengths and weaknesses’ are regular words that have now been drafted into the rhetorical arsenal of creationists,” said Kathy Miller, director of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that promotes religious freedom.

We have been through this and through this and through this for almost 100 years. Creationism is religion, not science, not by any conceivable definition that isn't substantively warped, yet still they come, bringing their Bibles and claiming that any science that doesn't fit their (extremely) limited view of the way the world works must be not just wrong but blasphemy.

After the Scopes trial in 1925, this contention looked so absurd that it faded into the background for decades. It has now usurped so much attention for so many years that it is time to explode this mythology once and for all. How that is to be done in the face of rigid beliefs that won't bend to reality, I don't know, but it has gone on long enough. They are making a mockery of education in general and science in particular, and despite how foolish they always end up looking they come back for more. Every one of these idiotic incursions has to be beat back by the forces of sanity and each one is sneakier and more underhanded than the last.

There is ZERO excuse for allowing religion to replace science and all the mystical, Bible-thumping claptrap in the world isn't going to change that. We need to find a way to end this nonsense and send these troglodytes back where they belong - under the rocks they crawled out from underneath. If we don't we'll be fighting the same battle every year for the rest of out children's and grandchildren's lives.

Enough is enough.