Oh well, let's move on...
Meanwhile, as part of an organization I'm in, I will soon get to speak to Kansas Board Member Sue Gamble on December 1st. Keep reading my stuff, and I will post anything I get out of her. I promise!
The reason I said that I thought a swing back to the mainstream in Kansas was imminent, well, because it is. Here, now all 6 members who voted for the new standards now have challengers. The people of Kansas who are not fundamentalist airheads are outraged over this whole thing. I read the Kansas City Star regularly, and I haven't seen a fundamentalist-supporting letter in days. That is a good sign, and a bad sign for the current board members.
"For evidence that evolution works very slowly, ponder the Kansas Board of Education and its electorate.
In 1999, a board majority that had been elected as conservative but not specifically anti-evolution pushed creationism into the state's science curriculum. The next year, an appalled electorate voted the anti-evolution zealots out, and the anti-science "standards" were scrapped.
End of issue, right? Not exactly. Here we go again.
Gulled anew, Kansans elected another conservative slate two years ago and, sure enough, it has now ordered "intelligent design" - a re-gimmicked version of creationism - into the state' science classes. And this time, the board went further.
The board answered the awkward criticism that intelligent design fits no definition of science by simply redefining science, scrapping the phrase "a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena."
If unadmittedly, that was to make room for God - specifically, if only implicitly, the Christian God - but it equally opens the way for magic, gremlins and things that go bump in the night.
This is the common pattern. Voters sucker for conservative candidates, often running as champions of back-to-basics schooling and traditional values, and find they have installed anti-science activists.
If the courts don't get to the resulting anti-evolution hustles first and bar them as patently unconstitutional efforts to bootleg religion into the public schools, the voters typically vote the scoundrels out at the first opportunity.
That happened again this November in Dover, Pa., where the school system was hauled into federal court after a board majority added intelligent design to science classes. All eight of the anti-evolution incumbents were booted.
Kansas voters will have another crack at a reversal next year, when four of the six state school board members who ordered the schools to teach specific anti-evolution arguments are up for re-election.
But there is more at play here than just the comings and goings of local school board candidates.
The so-called family values crowd - have even declared against approval of a vaccine that would prevent cervical cancer, on the grounds that it would encourage folks to have sex. Better 5,000 or so dead women a year than fewer virgins.
It turns out the Know Nothing Party didn't die with the 19th century after all."
--Article on
Tallahassee Democratif you want verification.
Well, there you go. Come around 2006, that Board will be gone, and the new people in there, (as they have already been promising) are going to change these standards back. The Evangelicals have been blowing thousands of dollars on PR campaigns using tax-free, donated money, but now that people have seen logic, science will win. No matter how long this debate goes on, science will win, because there's no logic behind creationism, just belief in miracles. And that cannot be allowed to stand up to science.
(Message to the ADMINS: you may notice that I modified this article. I left out those parts which I thought didn't make a good point. However, I did not add anything to it, and those who want to see the whole thing can follow the provided link, though if you're a republican, I probably wouldn't beacause it has a bunch of liberal political jargon.)
Wiseman45
This message has been edited by wiseman45, 11-15-2005 11:47 AM
This message has been edited by wiseman45, 11-15-2005 11:49 AM
This message has been edited by wiseman45, 11-15-2005 11:58 AM
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