[Vision2020] Dinosaurs and Denial

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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December 7, 2012
Dinosaurs and Denial By CHARLES M. BLOW

Finally, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — a Tea Party darling and possible
2016 presidential candidate — admits that dinosaurs and humans didn’t
co-exist.

Last month, when GQ asked
Rubio<http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201212/marco-rubio-interview-gq-december-2012?currentPage=2>“how
old do you think the Earth is?” he stammered through an answer.

“I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says. I can
tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst
theologians.” He continued, “Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7
actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of
the great mysteries.”

This week, in an interview with
Politico<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TgkyOnnFXPA>,
he attempted to mop up that mess.

He said, “There is no scientific debate on the age of the Earth. I mean,
it’s established pretty definitively. It’s at least 4.5 billion years old.”

But then he hedged: “I just think in America we should have the freedom to
teach our children whatever it is we believe. And that means teaching them
science. They have to know the science, but also parents have the right to
teach them the theology and to reconcile those two things.”

Why the hedge? Because he is in a party of creationists. According to a
June Gallup report<http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/Hold-Creationist-View-Human-Origins.aspx>,
most Republicans (58 percent) believed that God created humans in their
present form within the last 10,000 years. Most Democrats and independents
did not agree.

This anti-intellectualism is antediluvian. No wonder a 2009 Pew Research
Center report found<http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/>that
only 6 percent of scientists identified as Republican and 9 percent
identified as conservative.

Furthermore, a 2005 study found that just 11 percent of college professors
identified as Republican and 15 percent identified as conservative. Some
argue that this simply represents a liberal bias in academia. But just as
strong a case could be made that people who absorb facts easily don’t
suffer fools gladly.

Last month, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, the chairman of the Republican
Governors Association, said on
CNN<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0GHyHdI7Z8>:


“We need to stop being the dumb party. We need to offer smart,
conservative, intelligent ideas and policies.”

This is exactly the kind of turn the Republicans need to take, but Jindal’s
rhetoric doesn’t completely line up with his record. As The Scotsman of
Edinburgh reported in
June<http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman/scotland/loch-ness-monster-cited-by-us-schools-as-evidence-that-evolution-is-myth-1-2373903>,
“Pupils attending privately run Christian schools in the southern state of
Louisiana will learn from textbooks next year, which claim Scotland’s most
famous mythological beast is a living creature.” That mythological beast
would be the Loch Ness monster.

The Scotsman continued: “Thousands of children are to receive publicly
funded vouchers enabling them to attend the schools — which follow a strict
fundamentalist curriculum. The Accelerated Christian Education (ACE)
programme teaches controversial religious beliefs, aimed at disproving
evolution and proving creationism. Youngsters will be told that if it can
be proved that dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same time as man, then
Darwinism is fatally flawed.”

This is all because of a law that Jindal signed. Thankfully, last week a
state judge ruled<http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-11-30/national/35586001_1_voucher-program-louisiana-school-boards-association-judge-tim-kelley>that
the voucher program is unconstitutional. But Louisiana isn’t the only
red state where creationism has state support.

Kentucky has a Creationist Museum that warns
visitors<http://creationmuseum.org/about/>to “be prepared to
experience history in a completely unprecedented way,”
according to its Web site. It continues: “Adam and Eve live in the Garden
of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers.”
Unprecedented is certainly one word for it.

Now the museum group is planning to build a creationist theme park, with
$43 million in state tax
incentives<http://www.kentucky.com/2011/05/20/1745988/43-million-tax-break-approved.html>.
It should be noted that Mitt Romney won Kentucky by 23 points last
month. President
Obama won only four<http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/state/KY/president>of
Kentucky’s 120 counties.

And the beginning of the world isn’t the only point of denial. So is the
potential end of it. A March Gallup poll
found<http://www.gallup.com/poll/153653/Americans-Worries-Global-Warming-Slightly.aspx>that
Republicans were much less likely than Democrats or independents to
say that they worried about global warming. Only 16 percent of Republicans
said that they worried a great deal about it, while 42 percent of Democrats
and 31 percent of independents did.

This as the National Climatic Data Center
reported<http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/ncdc-releases-november-2012-us-climate-report>that
“the January-November period was the warmest first 11 months of any
year on record for the contiguous United States, and for the entire year,
2012 will most likely surpass the current record (1998, 54.3°F) as the
warmest year for the nation.”

Surely some of this is because of party isolationism and extremism and
what David
Frum, the conservative columnist,
called<http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/11/frum-republicans-lied-to-by-conservative-entertainment-149120.html>the
“conservative entertainment complex.” But there is also willful
ignorance at play in some quarters, and Republicans mustn’t simply brush it
aside. They must beat it back.

If the Republicans don’t want to see their party go the way of the
dinosaurs, they have to step out of the past.

•

I invite you to join me on Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/CharlesMBlow>and follow me on
Twitter <http://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow>, or e-mail me at
chblow at nytimes.com.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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