Since I just mentioned last week's Clown Award, let's do this week's - the award given, as always, for meritorious stupidity.This week the big red nose is a group award, given to some Kentucky citizens who opposed new science standards for the state, awarded in recognition of their striking demonstration of the truly appalling ignorance of right-wingers.
Kentucky is one of the states considering what are called Next Generation Science Standards. The Kentucky state Board of Education adopted the standards in June and held hearings last week to to get public feedback before the program is presented to the state legislature for official approval.
The standards were developed with input from officials in 26 states - including Kentucky - and are intended to make science curricula more uniform across the country.
And of course the know-nothings were out in force to express their utter shock that their dear children were to be exposed to - gasp - science! The standards in the program cover a wide swath of science and involve hundreds of points, but there were just two that were the main target of the mouth-breathers: You got it, evolution and climate change.
Matt Singleton, a Baptist minister, invoked the paranoid's all-purpose monster "outsiders" as he denounced the standards as "fascist" that essentially outlaw "the right to worship almighty god" because they teach "the rich man’s elitist" - he's working in all the clichés, isn't he - "the rich man’s elitist religion of evolution," evolution being, he said, "a lie" that has led to drug abuse, suicide, and other social afflictions by teaching that "our children are the property of the state.”
One parent, Valerie O’Rear, said the standards promote an “atheistic world view” and a political agenda that pushes government control.
Meanwhile, Dena Stewart-Gore claimed that the standards will ostracize religious students and that the standards are "socialism," which, she said, "takes anybody that doesn’t fit the mold and discards them. We are even talking genocide and murder here, folks.”
So in their minds, science, knowledge, is "fascist" "atheistic" "socialism" that leads to political and social oppression, drug abuse, suicide, murder, and genocide.
You know what? I take it back. These people aren't clowns. They are sick. Sick with fear of a world they can't control bringing changes they can't comprehend. And I feel sorry for them.
Someone who is a clown, however, is state Sen. Mike Wilson, who chairs the state’s Senate Education Committee, one that has to approve the new curriculum. And he has made it clear that he thinks that climate change is a lot of hooey.
By the way, there is some news on the climate change front, which I'll get to next week.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/next-generation-science-standards_n_3672418.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20130723/NEWS01/307220132/School-science-hotly-debated-Kentucky?nclick_check=1
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/06/12/2141431/will-a-denier-scrub-curriculum-that-teaches-climate-science-to-kentucky-schoolchildren/
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