A few weeks ago, I let you know about a dimwitted Christianist named Frosty Hardison in Washington state who got his panties in a wad when his daughter was shown Al Gore’s global warming documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, because “The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn’t in the DVD.” Yeah, dumb, I know.
Sadly, it’s not over, because the science teacher was disciplined for not alerting parents that their student would be viewing something ‘controversial’. Well, the good news is that there’s been a backlash…
Members of the school board say they have been bombarded by thousands of e-mails and phone calls, many of them hurtful and obscene, accusing them of scientific ignorance, pandering to religion and imposing prior restraint on free speech….
In public comments at the board meeting, several riled-up Federal Way residents argued that “An Inconvenient Truth” was, indeed, scientifically true and that saying otherwise is “deliberate obfuscation.”
These residents derisively compared the search for “balance” in the global-warming issue to decades of phony claims by cigarette companies about the lack of “proof” that smoking is harmful to human health.
Yep, it’s all about ‘balance’, I guess. Just look at those mountains of tangible evidence the Holocaust deniers use, right? Good luck on that one…
His daughter’s science teacher, meanwhile, said she is struggling to find authoritative articles to counter the information in the Gore documentary.
“The only thing I have found so far is an article in Newsweek called ‘The Cooling World,’ ” Walls said.
It was written 37 years ago.
I think it was Dawkins who said, ‘Every one is entitled to their own opinion. They’re not entitled to their own set of facts.’ This case is a classic example of how this man (Hardiman) should be publicly ridiculed because of the crap he’s slinging. There’s no way around it. Meanwhile, say goodbye to the glaciers in the Alps.
I’ve mentioned it before. We constantly hear when parents got up in arms when their kids are taught science in school that contradicts their fairytale beliefs about what really happened. Ed Brayton, over at ‘Dispatches from the Cultural Wars’, when speaking of this ‘parents always know best’ phenomenon, nails it on the head:
But legal issues are not decided on what taxpayers like or dislike, nor should they be. If you put up for a vote what should be taught in public schools, the results would be frightening. And why should such a thing be put to a vote? Why would we give credence to someone to make a judgment on what ought to be taught in a science classroom if they know little or nothing about science? We don’t put medical diagnoses up for a vote of the public, nor do we take straw polls to decide what is wrong when our car doesn’t work, we defer to the judgment of those trained in medicine or auto mechanics because they have a far better chance of actually knowing what they’re talking about.
The same is true in matters of science or history or mathematics, which just like auto mechanics or medicine require a good deal of study and expertise in order to be understood. Asking the general public to decide what ought to be taught in a class in which the vast majority of them would have a vanishingly small chance of passing a mid-term exam is as absurd as asking the janitors at the hospital the best course of treatment for a herniated disk; they simply do not have the knowledge required to make an informed choice.
And so the battle rages on.