In God We Trust
If you haven’t read the book “What’s the Matter with Kansas” by Thomas Frank yet, you can get a preview in today’s NY Times story on the Kansas Board of Education’s impending mandate that evolution be taught side by side with “intelligent design” in Kansas science classes.
The irony hasn’t been lost on anyone that this year is the 80th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. My friend from Kansas has already called to make chimp noises into the phone. Not, as she says, because Kansans are descended from apes, but because the Kansas Board of Education clearly hasn’t evolved yet.
I’ve pissed off a few Christian conservatives here before when I suggested that the real problem with fundamentalists is that they are allowed to vote. My thinking on this is evolving, though. Keep reading.
The first amendment clearly states that the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Now, the majority of the members of what shall now by known as the Kansas Ministry of Ministry Propaganda all unabashedly admit that they believe in creationism, and, yes, these hearings they are holding have a purpose. Here’s how one board member put it, according to the Times, “I was hoping these hearings would help me have some good hard evidence that I could repeat.” That is, I was hoping someone could come up with a logical explanation to refute the actual logical explanation of evolution. Her problem is that everyone who knows what the word logic or evidence means accepts the abundantly clear case for evolution.
I started thinking about this all again last week when I was reading a report on the problems with production of flu vaccines. The basic problem is that flu vaccines have to be made fresh and fast every year, after the current strain of flu virus makes itself apparent. As the immunologist said, “Our problem is the virus evolves all the time. It changes. So, we have to make a different vaccine every year.”
So here’s my solution to the Kansas problem. Let’s let them vote. This will, I hope, appease my earlier critics.
But, I say anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution doesn’t get to have the flu vaccine. They don’t believe in its underlying premise after all. Then when the epidemic hits, we’ll all get a lesson in what Darwin meant by “survival of the fittest.” The simians running Kansas are going to be in big trouble.
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