More Creationist Absurdity

Doug Patton, a freelance writer for mensnewsdaily.com and gopusa.com, has written a column on evolution that is so abysmal that it might well qualify him as the Idiot of the Month if I didn't already have one. Perhaps I should wait a day and give him December's award. I especially like this passage:

I believe in creationism. I believe that God created the earth and everything on its face, including human beings. I think it takes a great deal more faith to believe in Darwin's theory of random selection than it does to believe that an all-powerful Supreme Being created all this with a purpose in mind.

Theory of random selection? I'll take oxymorons for $1000, Alex.

ACLU involvement in a Dover, Pennsylvania, case clearly shows their desperation. Last month, the school board in this rural south-central Pennsylvania community became the first in the nation to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design," which holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power. The "higher power" is unspecified, but that does not matter to the zealots at the ACLU, who endorse ignorance because they believe that any mention or reference to anything remotely like a Supreme Being is "an establishment of religion" and therefore unconstitutional.

What is that ACLU involvement that "clearly shows their desperation"? Well....they're "looking into it". Here's the sum total of the ACLU's response at this point to the vote in Dover:

The state American Civil Liberties Union chapter is reviewing the Dover Area School District case. Its Georgia counterpart, meanwhile, is fighting a suburban Atlanta district's decision to include a warning sticker in biology textbooks that says evolution is "a theory, not a fact."

"What Dover has done goes much further than what's happened in Georgia," said Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania ACLU. "As far as we can tell, Dover is the first school district that has actually mandated intelligent design."

Wow. They're "reviewing it". How desperate of them. Now of course they will end up filing suit at some point because there are several court precedents that support their position. Patton doesn't bother to mention those precedents, or to even consider whether the ACLU is correct or not. He wraps it all up under the false guise of "academic freedom". Sorry, Doug, but this has nothing to do with academic freedom. No public school teacher is free to teach whatever they want. They can't teach that the earth is flat, they can't teach that the sun revolves around the earth, and they can't teach that disease is caused by an angry God or a devious devil - all of which are religiously based alternatives to well documented scientific theories. Why? Because all those things are false. So is creationism. The Supreme Court has already ruled, 7-2, that teaching creationism amounts to an establishment of religion and is therefore unconstitutional.

More like this

One of the standard arguments we hear from the Hate the ACLU crowd is that the ACLU is that they are "getting rich on taxpayer money" because, in some cases, Federal law allows plaintiffs who sue government agencies successfully to recover their legal fees.
One of the frequent readers here posted a link to my post about their silly guilt-by-association attempt regarding the sex change for prisoners case in Massachusetts, and the author of their article,
A few days ago I wrote about Volokh's use of the phrase "ACLU Derangement Syndrome" in relation to Clayton Cramer, who had
Clayton Cramer is also discussing the Polk County "free speech zone" situation, partially in response to my post