Everything but a proboscis

In case you're wondering what's waiting in the shadows for America's schoolchildren should the teaching of vapid non-theories such as Intelligent Design creationism be allowed in public schools, look no further than creationevidence.org. The progressives behind this operation have set up a special section for Web-savvy kids, featuring a trio of wall-eyed young scholars and a dinosaur named Muncher.

Standard disclaimer: This is not a parody site.

Note the typical references to "evolutionists" and their wrongful ways, along with a sketch of an addled Darwin with a halo of question marks around his head. That's right -- get 'em while they're young. Ironically, the pressures of natural selection themselves are responsible for the extreme psychological plasticity of young 'uns, who in almost all cases stand to benefit greatly from believing exactly what their parents tell or otherwise convey to them. In many cases, their very survival depends on such trust ("Don't eat that nightshade 'shroom; don't feed the lions"), but of course religion -- coupling as it does fear of retribution for not believing with a perverse promise of "salvation" in return for faith -- fully exploits the same quality in a most reprehensible way.

It's no wonder Bible-boppers indoctrinated at a tender age grow up viewing scientists not only as errant but as strictly adversarial. When I was learning the basics about dinosaurs and archaeology as a five- and six-year-old, and later as a schoolkid digesting the standard tenets of the life sciences as fed to me by the Concord School District, my parents and teachers never prefaced any of their lessons with defensive-minded innuendo such as "Despite the claims of creationists..." or "Fundies in their infinite loopiness are often heard to say..." Of course, they didn't have to, and still shouldn't. But with an already choked court system now forced to deal with the implacable backwardness of American fundagelicals in Dover, Pa. (you can follow the goings-on in that case here), Kansas, Cobb County, Ga., Utah, and elsewhere, a certain amount of battling incendiary palaver with inflammable retorts has seemingly become necessary. Politeness and simply waiting for the "obvious" truth to prevail has never worked, and with Christian extremists ever more emboldened under a galactically benighted President, it's even less effective today.

It's heartening that the ID folks appear to be getting their asses handed to them in Harrisburg; they've simply left too obvious a trail over the years that they're nothing more than creationists under a flimsy guise, and thanks to the 1987 SCOTUS ruling barring creationism from American schoolrooms, this will likely kill them in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case regardless of what else is presented therein. The discouraging aspect is knowing that these misguided sentinels of God's will are never going to give up. Swatting a dozen mosquitoes to death never discouraged hordes more from piling out of the wet underbrush and onto tender skin, and these clowns, driven by even baser appetites, are scarcely different.