The First Church of Free Speech

I have a very important announcement. More than 8 out of 10 Americans are being [url=http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060328/ap_on_go_co/delay_courts;_ylt=At7n_Cpt9..hFJ71gCsNnrmyFz4D;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA–]persecuted[/url] right now … [i]by the Judicial Branch of the United States of America![/i]

This may come as a surprise to the moderate Christian crowd out there. But let me assure you, this is very real. You’re not being herded into camps, nor are your churches being burned down, nor is the government telling you that you can’t go to church. But don’t be fooled. Those days are a stone’s throw away. Sure, you may [i]think[/i] that Christians basically control every branch of government, but just because the sweeping majority of Americans are Christians, virtually every elected representative in Congress is a professed Christian and atheists are the [url=http://www.ur.umn.edu/FMPro?-db=releases&-lay=web&-format=umnnewsreleases/releasesdetail.html&ID=2816&-Find]most distrusted group in America[/url] doesn’t mean that they can’t be persecuted too!

I’m long past the point of saying that such comments by bigots like DeLay are surprising, but with the Republicans in control, the only thing that would surprise me at this point would be competence and tolerance. They are good at exactly one thing: maintaining their position of power. And they do that with comments like this. Ever noticed how everything is an “attack” with Bush and his constituents? Gays aren’t trying to gain the right to marriage; they’re [i][b]attacking[/b] the institution of marriage[/i]. Judges aren’t enforcing the separation of church and state; they are [i][b]attacking[/b] Christians[/i]. The Democrats aren’t trying to maintain checks and balances on the Executive Branch; they’re [i][b]attacking[/b] the president[/i] because he wants to fight terrorists.

The Republicans have realized one very important aspect of American culture that allows them to manipulate the general public at will: Americans like cheering for the underdog. Even more, Americans like [i]pretending[/i] that they actually [i]are[/i] underdogs. That’s why fundamentalist Christians, despite making up about half the nation, go on and on about how they are being put down by the government and have precious little recourse. But don’t worry! Rush Limbaugh will lead the unified, God-fearing troops against the evil forces of Big Liberal Government! Despite vastly outnumbering the opposition, God’s Army will triumph against the secular atheist snakes!

So despite the fact that Republicans control the Supreme Court, Presidency and Congress, for some reason, they’re [i]still[/i] underdogs. This is truly a new phenomenon in the field of politics. Apparently the Democrats, the party which is the political equivalent of chickens running around with their heads cut off, are still powerful enough to impede the majority party’s agenda! No one knows how they’ve done it, but they managed to stop Bush from invading Iraq, make sure that the upper class didn’t get [i]any[/i] tax cuts at all, push through socialized healthcare and stifle Bush’s domestic, warrantless wire-tapping program.

Oh … wait.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan is hot by default.

When she’s perforating (thanks to CrooksAndLiars.com for the video) the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq is just peachy and the media is being pessimistic and not reporting on the good things happening, she’s about a squillion times hotter. Oh yeah, and I want to see her in a cat fight with Laura “Ingrate” Ingraham.

Logan’s main points are as follows.

• Media correspondents are not allowed free access to the country due to security concerns. Everywhere they go, they are required to have military escort. They can go places when the military can get them an escort.
• Any time they find a good story, like a school opening or a reconstruction project, they’re not allowed to report on it because such reports could make those places and projects targets for the insurgency.
• Security is the Number 1 concern in Iraq for various reasons. Why should it come as a surprise that the coverage coming out of there is primarily related to security?

Overall, an intelligent, devastating and oh-so-sexy rebuttal to Bush’s latest round of bullshit about Iraq.

Oh yeah, and Ms. Logan looks damn good in body armor.

I’ve gotten over 50 comments on my post about the intelligent design. This is far more than I’ve ever gotten on any post. So what’s with the sudden swell in popularity? I have a few theories. I’ve had a few ping-backs, so that could explain it. People visiting other, more trafficked blogs happen to run across mine, and since I speak about intelligent design in only the most vitriolic sense, people get upset.

The other possibility is that it’s some sort of organized attack by creationists. This type of tactic certainly isn’t unique to them; lots of different groups (including my own community of Mac users) coordinate attacks on people posting things they don’t like. One user sees an article he doesn’t like, posts it to a BBS and suddenly there’s a deluge of comments coming in.

It’s too bad really. I explicitly stated in that post that I’d already gone into detail as to why intelligent design is unscientific, but none of the geniuses posting comments decided to go and read those posts. So here’s the post in question.

In any case, I’m happy about the popularity. There might be a bunch of people accusing me of being intolerant and dogmatic (as good a display of psychological projection as I’ve ever seen), but at least people are visiting my little corner of the web.

So in conclusion, thanks for encouraging me. Now all you IDers can blow me.

Kirk of Reasons Unbeknownst ping-backed my post on intelligent design, so I figured I’d do him the same courtesy in my reply. (Is that considered a courtesy? I don’t know. I’m only blogging to see my own writing.) He also mirrored part of the post in the comments. Anyway, here’s what he had to say.

Great points until you get into economics. The intellectuals with Ph.Ds in econ tend to think Socialism is a great idea. The god fearing masses may be wrong about darwin but their low-tax instincts are a good thing. In other words it could be worse, we could be a nation of atheists that think Marx was on to something. Ideally we’d be pro separation of Church/State and anti-Socialist but that’s a hell of a lot to ask people who don’t want to live without either a big friendly god or a big friendly brother. Though I wonder if big governments see religion as competition (tithings vs. taxes) and subtly discourage religion, though China unsubtly encarcerates Falun Gongers.

Kirk, you’ve got this apparent dichotomy of “It’s either small government or it’s a bunch of fucking commies”. Like lots of things in life, there is a happy medium between social and personal responsibility. Like it or not, we do live with other people who we have an unwritten contract with, and we, as a society, do have obligations to each other. You can have social policy without being a communist government. You’re also making the mistake of equating big social governments and big economic governments. They are not the same, and in fact, one can be big while the other can be small.

The neo-con invasion of the Republican party should have made this clear. Under Saint Ronald and now George W. Bush, the federal government’s social influence in the everyday lives of its citizens increased substantially. One of Reagan’s worst policy initiatives was giving the FCC the power to curb free speech on public airwaves, and Bush is making it clear that he wants the power to poke his nose into Americans’ homes, phone calls and private communications whenever it suits him, without any court review at all. While he was busy peeking under our sheets, Bush and his neo-con buddies have shot through legislation that basically lets corporations run roughshod over the consumer. Because hey, the Invisible Hand will always be there to protect the consumer’s interests, right? Sorry, I don’t think so. When you have little or no government regulation over the free market, you get monopolies like Microsoft and cartels like the RIAA and MPAA. Oh yeah, and the oil and pharmaceutical companies get to ram a government-subsidized screwdriver up the American people’s ass.

The Republican party got into bed with the Christian right, so I hardly think that churches are considered “competition” by our glorious leaders. No, churches are for harvesting voters. The problem is that the Christian right doesn’t realize that. They think the Republican party actually gives a shit about their agenda at some time other than an election year. Once the likes of Pat Robertson realize that the Republicans will never deliver on their promises to end abortion and amend the Constitution to outlaw gay marriage (otherwise what would they use to get the bigoted masses to the polls?), they’ll stay their asses home on election day. And that day can’t come soon enough.

Today there have been three different polls from Zogby, Gallup and Harris, respectively, about Americans’ views on intelligent design and creationism. They all seem to agree on one thing.

Most Americans are total idiots.

In every poll, a majority of Americans believe that the Biblical creation story is the literal truth about how humans came into existence. And according to the Harris poll, 55% of Americans think that evolution, creationism and intelligent design should all be taught in science classes. According to the Zogby poll, a staggering 88% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 think that intelligent design should receive “equal time” in the classroom. All three polls also showed that the usual suspects are most likely to believe superstitious religious crap over science: Southerners, Republicans, those with no education beyond high school and old people. So if you’re a Southern Republican over 55 with no higher education and you don’t subscribe to creationism or intelligent design, congratulations. You’re a statistical anomoly.

Americans are particularly vulnerable to this “equal time” bullshit because we tend to think everything should be a democratic process and that the will of the people reigns supreme. (Even though our own government is essentially opposed to that notion and for good reason.) But I’ve already ranted at length about intelligent design’s total stupidity, so I won’t repeat myself. Rather, I’ll address a larger question.

Should high school boards of education have any place questioning the work of people who have actually done research and have doctorates? Absolutely not. High school teachers are only supposed to know enough to teach to high school [i]students[/i]. In science, that means the very, very basic fundamentals. And board members don’t even have to know anything about the subject, since they’re elected by a largely scientifically ignorant population, which is worse since, as far as I can tell, they’re the ones making the big push for this bullshit in every case. I’ve never seen anything to indicate that intelligent design is especially popular among actual biology teachers.

But that politicians who spend their time designing curricula for [i]teenagers[/i] think they’re qualified enough to raise doubts about the work of career biologists doing research at [i]universities[/i] is so incredibly arrogant that it almost defies comprehension. And the idea that high school students will be able to reach an informed conclusion after being taught intelligent design as though it has parity with evolution is sheer lunacy. This is a group of people wherein there exists a large proportion who have serious conceptual problems with basic algebra. And we’re supposed to trust them to draw a sound conclusion about the validity of a theory which is the result of spending millions of collective man-hours studying mountains of data? Just how much faith do these intelligent design people have in high school students?

What the intelligent design people are asking is akin to making a high school physics teacher cover all the cases where Newtonian gravity and motion fail and forcing him to go into relativity, which is absurd. And that’s is a case where there [i]is[/i] legitimate opposition to Newtonian mechanics! In biology, the overall theory of evolution is about as rock-solid as you can get in science. Granted, evolution isn’t a perfect theory, but it is an exceedingly good one. There probably are examples of its predictions not coming through here and there, and I know that some biologists are saying that natural selection isn’t the only thing responsible for imposing selective pressure. (Note that none of them are proposing The Hand of God as an alternative mechanism.)

One could draw a lot of parallels between this debate and the current controversy over pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control. (The difference of course, being that the pharmacists are being far more transparent about their motives.) In both cases, people who are grossly unqualified are seeking to supersede the authority of people who are qualified under the guise of Constitutional rights. The pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control are wannabe doctors, just like intelligent design advocates are wannabe biologists. They’re both unsatisfied with being in the position of having to defer to people who know more than they do, so they’re trying to stir up shit. As Bill Maher once said about pharmacists, “Fellas, a pharmacist is not a law-giver, not even a doctor. In the medical pecking order, you rank somewhere in between a chiropractor and a tree surgeon.”

Well, to borrow slightly, high school educators are not scientists. Hell, they’re not even lab assistants. In the scientific pecking order, they rank somewhere between the writers of Star Trek and Mister Wizard.