The one item that’s slipping through the cracks a bit is the Kansas State Board of Education, and their recent 6-4 vote in favor of teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. Quite frankly, after this vote, I’m also starting to question evolution. Intelligent Design is about as scientific as cranial rectumitis - the very ailment members of the Kansas BOE appear to have contracted. The main group behind this new “theory” is a group known as the Discovery Institute. The president and founder of the Discovery Institute is Bruce Chapman, who also served as a Deputy Assistant to President Ronald Reagan from 1983-1985. He was also a fellow at the Hudson Institute, which in 1999, received money from the conservative philanthropy group known as the Smith Richardson Foundation to research Social Security privatization.
Additional funders of the Hudson Institute reads like a whose who of conservative philanthropies: Scaife Foundations, Castle Rock Foundation, Koch Family Foundations, etc.
The Hudson Institute has also taken to trashing organic foods, going so far as to creatively interprete reports by the Center for Disease Control, and thus forcing the CDC to refute the Hudson Institute’s claims.
In 1991, Bruce Chapman left the Hudson Institute and went on to found the Discovery Institute, and has stated that promoting Intelligent Design was the institute’s main priority.
On a lark, I decided to look up the definition to the word “institute”, and here’s what I found:
Institute:
n : an association organized to promote art or science or education
Funny, but it seems that the Discovery Institute does none of those things. The Discovery Institute has learned that it doesn’t matter what bunk your organization is peddling, if you simply throw the word institute into your name, you can convince some of the lemmings out there that you actually have a legitimate point of view.
Unfortunately, lemmings come in all shapes and sizes, including Bill Gates. In reason #146 as to why I prefer Apple computers, the NY Times reported last August that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given $1 million a year to the Discovery Institute, $50,000 of which comprises Bruce Chapman’s $141,000 salary. The running total of their foundation’s contribution to the Discovery Institute: $10 million.
While all this seems way too depressing, there is a bright spot. Last Tuesday, the voters in Dover, Pennsylvania, ousted 8 of 9 school board members who supported the teaching of Intelligent Design in their school district. According to the New York Times:
Registered Republicans cast their party affiliations aside to run with the victorious Dover Cares slate when election rules forced all eight of its candidates to run on the Democratic line.
Voters themselves crossed party lines to vote for the candidates they favored. If they had not, the school board incumbents, all of whom ran on the Republican line, would probably have prevailed in a district where 70 percent of voters are registered Republicans.
This of course prompted everyone’s favorite missing link, Pat Robertson, to state on his unintentionally comedic show, The 700 Club:
“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city.”
I really have to start watching that show. A little known fact about The 700 Club is that the number “700″ refers to the number of things Pat Robertson will say to give Christians a bad name.
In any case, it appears that with the Dover voters, there is a little hope that not all is lost in this battle - a battle which should be just as extinct as the Homo habilis.
