Christine Comer's forced resignation from the Texas Education Agency, however, clearly reveals the intolerant mindset that lurks under a thin veneer of civility in the hearts of many IDers.
Barbara Forrest's discussion on the Oxford University Press weblog provides some insightful responses regarding Comer's dismissal for forwarding an e-mail with information about a speech Forrest was giving in Austin. Here's a quote:
According to the TEA, "Ms. Comer's [FYI] e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral." My first reaction to this statement is that forwarding an e-mail with an "FYI" is not equivalent to an endorsement of either my appearance or my presentation topic, "Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse: A Closer Look at Intelligent Design." My next reaction is this question: even if Ms. Comer's forwarding the announcement were tantamount to endorsement, why should one of the largest departments of education in the country, whose responsibility is to ensure that children receive a twenty-first-century -- not a nineteenth-century -- education, decline to publicly support evolutionary theory, one of the soundest scientific theories ever constructed, plainly out of fear of irritating creationists and their political supporters?
I find it difficult to avoid concluding that Ms. Comer has become a casualty of the pro-ID political agenda.
2 comments:
Dr. P,
Have you heard about Ben Stein's new documentary (out in February)called, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"? Sounds like the premise is about ID scientists being bullied out of the education system. Oh, brother.
This crowd is much the same crowd (including the pastor at my former - thankfully, former - church) that has for years claimed that both sides are equally at fault in the Southern Baptist Convention controversy - they thereby excused their fence-sitting while the Fundamentalists devoured their prey.
Now this bunch tries to tell us that "intelligent design" deserves "equal time" with evolution. Once again, they have created a straw man and then claimed that it is equal to the truth. Yet they hypocritically accuse the rest of us of "taking license with the revealed truth" (as with Al Mohler's criticism of Mullins's treatment of soul competency) - and the average person in the pew willingly falls for such falderol; the primary conviction of the average person in the pew is that ignorance is bliss - and he chooses to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It's easier that way.
The first tragedy is that some Christians have decided to tell God how He must have created humankind. They have declared evolution inconsistent with the work of an Intelligent Designer. If humans evolved, they say, then there is no Creator behind the process, because they KNOW that God wouldn't do it that way.
The second tragedy is that these same Christians have trivialized the Christian faith - and our Judeo-Christian heritage - by insinuating it into the science textbooks and the science classroom. It is blasphemous to treat God's name so frivolously. God is so much greater than they imagine Him to be.
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