A blast from the past. Some of the names may have changed but the ignorance has bloomed like kudzu in a southern river. I believe we will prevail but it will be a long, hard slog. The original posting has been edited and added to.
A series of articles and their comments had me looking at this picture with more than the usual interest.
There's the "I don't have kids, or I've gotten my kids through school so why do I have to pay to teach other people's kids?" Well duh. If other folks kids don't have access to a decent education we all have to live with the results now don't we? And if you don't want to take out your own appendix I guess one of your kids better have gone to medical school, install your wiring or repair your leaky plumbling.
And there's the relatively new, usually from fundamentalists, "I should be able to control what my kids learn," Upfront. There a great, private parochial schools in this country. Catholic and Protestant. And then there's the other guys. It's the other guys I'm concerned with here.
With very little effort you too can echo someone like Senator Inhof from Oklahoma. There is no human caused climate change because "God is still up there." God or the goddess or whoever may have given the universe a divine boot in the ass in the beginning but when humans came along we carry the ability to work WITH Creation or toally fuck it up. And then there are those workbooks that show Adam, Eve and a dinosaur cheerfully coexisting in the Garden. Must have left the T Rexs on the other side of the fence.
Or you can find your school board discussing the inclusion of so called intelligent design or creation "science" in the curriculum of your local schools. All in the name of fairness of course.
Question any of this on a comment thread and I can guarantee that there will be multiple accusations of Christian bashing. liberal intolerance and general you're not being nice to me comments.
And you know what? I've discovered that I AM intolerant. I'm intolerant of willful ignorance. I'm intolerant of public officials using their religious beliefs to set public policy on the environment,climate change, women's health issues or LGBT rights. I'm intolerant of these same public officials citing petitions, research and statistics that have been discredited or are so loosely monitored that the signers may have changed their minds. Or are no longer among the living. Imagine being able to sign a petition about climate change and you don't have to have a degree in anything related to the problem.
Did a little research. The petition information claims almost ten thousand Ph.D's have signed. The US has nearly 3.250,000 Ph.D's, covering a dizzying range of disciplines. That works out to just over .002 percent. That's not two percent, it's a franction of one percent. And a fraction of those have a degree in anything to do with the climate or weather.
I'm also intolerant of so called pregnancy crisis centers that have been caught out right lying to girls and women who turn to them for help. I really hope this isn't true but at least one center advised their supporters to volunteer to drive patients to their abortion appointments and then deliberately make them miss their appointments by driving someplace else. I guess it's ok to lie as long as you believe you have a good excuse.
I'm intolerant of the Gohmerts, Stockmans, Inhofs, Ryans, Cruzs, et al. playing politics with all of the above. Only now the names are Boebart, Cawthorne and Greene.
And you know something? I'm not about to apologize. I will however be polite. Reasonably polite. Most of the time. If I feel like it. We can't say this often enough. You may have the right to keep yourself ignorant. You do not have the right to pass that ignorance on to your children or inflict it on the rest of us.
You know I don't really believe that YOU have the right to keep yourself ignorant but damned if I know how we can fix that problem. You can lead a person to kowledge but you can't make them think.
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