Over the past few weeks a number of visitors have made it to this blog by searching the web for information about Sarah Palin & dinosaurs. Previously there wasn't much to say beyond a 2006 quote, but now new evidence has appeared that suggests that Palin indeed tried to get creationism into the classroom despite her public comments that she desired no such thing.
According to a little muckraking done by David Talbot for Salon.com, Palin may very well be a young earth creationist who tried to sneak fundamentalist religion into public schools;
Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. "She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board," said Munger, a music composer and teacher. "I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, 'Sarah, how can you believe in creationism -- your father's a science teacher.' And she said, 'We don't have to agree on everything.'
"I pushed her on the earth's creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she'd seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them."
While this is secondhand stuff, it is consistent with just about everything else we do know about Palin, and whether she believes humans and dinosaurs lived together in the last 10,000 has quickly become a running gag. Matt Damon has recently expressed concern about Palin's YEC beliefs, and questions over Palin's anti-science perspective have provided fodder for satire on Saturday Night Live, as well.
The scary thing is that there are many people in this country who probably see Palin's belief in coconut-munching tyrannosaurs to be a good thing. We might all have a few laughs at her expense, but it is truly a frightening prospect that someone so dictated by fundamentalist religion might end up in the White House. For now, though, I will be very interested to see if the issue is breached in the upcoming VP debate, an event that may very well be a spectacle given the tenacity of both Biden & Palin.
Archy has more, particularly about the reaction to conservatives to questions about Palin's grasp of paleontology.
[On a related note, John McCain has responded to the ScienceDebate questions sent to him. You can see his answers, alongside those of Obama, here.]
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Considering everything else about her: making rape victims pay for rape kits (wtf!?), her stance against abortion, her desire to drill everywhere possible in the arctic, she would make a very scary VP indeed.
I'm appalled at how many people thought she'd steal votes from the women who voted for Hillary. As if women just voted based on gender and nothing else. Hillary is staunchly pro-choice, so why would any woman who voted for Hillary vote for Palin? They have completely opposing political views. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that most women who voted for Hillary did so because they were democrats, not because of their sex.
Matt Damon for president.
There is a quote here going on that claims Palin says that dinosaurs were created 4,000 years ago and were doomed to be failures from the start. The quote is ruled to be a fake and is invented by a blogger as a practical joke. But knowing Palin's being a young earth creationist, it will come to no surprise when we find that Palin does believe in this dino-human trash and would utter stupid crank quotes very similar to what the blogger made up as a practical joke.
Obama indeed for president!
"-- From CNN:
Headline: Palin charms American heartland
Comment: American headland still unimpressed."
(From Tom Barlett, www.minortweaks.com)
I think that says it all.