Lost in the flood of results from last Tuesday’s election is the pleasing little fact that those who want to teach ancient fairy tales in our science classrooms took some heavy punishment. In Ohio, four pro-science candidates swept onto the state board of education, and the infamous Deborah Owens Fink will be needing a new job. In South Carolina, Karen Floyd has probably lost her job as Superintendent of Education to another good guy. Even the citizens of Kansas decided to clean up their notorious Board of Education. In big-name races, Rick Santorum, the Senate’s number one fan of ID, got hammered by a wide margin. Harping on the science vs. creationism issue didn’t seem to help the Republicans in Ohio very much.
Is it over? The GOP has done major kissing up to the far right over the past six years, and supporting creationism/ID has been a big component of that,
culminating with Dubya’s endorsement of teaching ID in public schools. But the conventional wisdom about the GOP’s strategy appears to be unraveling. It looks like most Pubs want less Evangelism and more common sense. Slicing out ID and sticking up for real science in schools would be a good place to start.
Of course there will still be some who still insist that some mumbo-jumbo about the irreducible complexity of a bacertial flagellum should be the basis for our entire society, but I think their political support is withering away. Beating them in one small city in Pennsylvania is one thing. Hammering them in three conservative states is something else. They simply don’t anywhere to turn for political support now.
Of course not. I heard from NPR that evangelical Christians still voted for Republicans about 70% versus 30% for Democrats. They have not lost their base, just a lot of swing voters for one election. I don’t think ID is going anywhere.
I actually think you might be onto something with your thesis, even if I disagree with the above. It looks like IDers are getting more and more marginalized, which will make it increasingly diffcult to get that idea into the public schools, even if it drives some of the hard-core creationists into private schools or home schooling. But the idea that Bush endorsed the teaching of ID in public schools misses the mark. He answered one question by one reporter and then did absolutely nothing about it. That’s the most passive “endorsement” possible. It’s like Kerry’s “non-endorsement” of SSM-- both would be happy never to discuss either issue as it is so far down on the list of priorities for them. Kerry wasn’t going to actively campaign against SSM and Bush isn’t going to actively campaign for getting ID into schools.
My guess is that the political component of the ID movement has always been in the minority. Sure, they make a lot of noise, but most people probably couldn’t care less one way or the other when it comes time to vote. Perhaps they got routed in this last election as part of the anti-Republican backlash, perhaps people are getting fed up with having their states be laughing stocks, perhaps people are genuinely starting to wise up to the falsehoods and misrepresentations presented by the ID movement (but, given the percentage of people who still believe in creationism in the U.S., I tend to doubt the latter…). But, they’ll always be out there. The question is, will they remain as vocal, giving their recent trouncing? I’d say as soon as the Republicans score their next big win, they’ll be back, as vocal as ever.
I’m not sure how much “harping” actually even occurred in Ohio. I live in the adjacent district to Fink, (so I was denied the opportunity to vote against her), and I drive through her area and get a lot of news and advertising from there and I did not see a single bit of publicity regarding the issue. (I even had to go look up the Board of Education seats at the last minute just to see if she was running, this year. Ohio has staggered terms for the Board, so my representative was elected in the previous election and I did not know whether Fink was running this year or in 2008.)
The general sweep of Ohio voters were in the swing middle, influenced by the Iraq War and the scandal plagued Republican administration. Even so, the Attorney General, the Supreme Court Justices, and several other positions stayed or changed to Republican control. Where was the Creationism issue being publicized in Ohio and how was it connected to the larger vote?
I tend to think that the ID movement really relies more on its PR than any actual grassroots support. That’s not to say that it has none, or even that it doesn’t command a large swath of people who would say that they support its general ideas (though by and large they don’t care much about it). But the ID movement has lived primarily because of the discovery institute and names like Dembski and Behe yammering about it. Nothing about elections changes that much, so they aren’t likely to go away regardless.
Their political fortunes have certainly taken a blow, but again: ID gets a heck of a lot of its power and status by portraying itself as a wrongly dismissed underdog. If anything, losing some of the political powerholds they might have had makes them even BETTER able to claim to be victims.
Seems to me it was “lost in the flood” because it simply wasn’t a big issue to a lot of voters. I’d love to believe that Americans are rejecting ID, but I bet if Iraq was going well there’d be legislation in the pipe already making it mandatory to teach from textbooks showing Jesus carving animals from magic pixie clay.
Well, for whatever it’s worth, Kansas seems to cycle back and forth between ID fans and those who are capable of thought. Last time Kansas had a majority of buffoons who pushed this claptrap, they were voted out. Then this latest cast of idiots were voted in. Now they’ve been voted out. Here’s to hoping that they’re kept out in the future, but judging by past performances, I won’t hold my breath.
According to New Scientist this week the IDers are just taking their kids out of public schools and setting up their own colleges so they’re safe from impure thinking.
I’m guessing the weird answers are from the user-input “Teach the Song Tapper” feature. It probably indiscriminately pairs what people input with what they tapped.
Everyone always brings up Patrick Henry college. I lived in Purcellville for years and saw it being built and the student body being put together. It’s teeny. I saw the whole first year class out at IHOP one day, for God’s sake.
And anyway, isn’t this exactly how things are supposed to work? Parents disagree with the teaching system in public schools and therefore send their kids to schools with whom they agree. What’s to complain about that. At worst the only one’s helped/hurt (depending on one’s point of view) are the kids involved.
I don’t think the IDers ever had a lot of support. The general public doesn’t to vote for the school board. That tends to be the election people either skip, or just vote party line because noone knows who the heck those people are. It makes it very easy to get on a school board if you have an agenda. All you have to do is get your entire church out to vote, and huzzah, you are a school board member. This works until people find out who you are and show up to vote against you.
Because they are filling their children’s heads with utter nonsense instead of science. It’s as bad as taking kids out of school because you are a flat-earther.
Your comments about school boards may be true in states which have county-wide schools systems, or in big cities in Ohio, but Ohio has over 600 school districts. Many of these districts consist of a couple of elementary schools, a middle school and a high school. In the small city where I live, candidates for the school board don’t run as members of a political party, and most people know who they are and vote. ID has not been an issue where I live, despite a strong fundamentalist element.
These homeschooled students aren’t fit for science–but they can go into politics! And they will use their influence to fight against science in public life. I’d consider that something worth complaining about.
I don’t think evolution or creationism/ID should be taught in school. There is absolutely no solid evidence for either one. Sure, there is plenty of “circumstantial evidence” supporting their theories, but not proof.
Thaty can be said of many things, including gravity, but the statement you have made usually appears as an attempt to equate creationism/ID and evolution. It may be true that none of them is 100% proven (as if that were possible in science anyway), but that doesn’t mean they have equal merit.