You're wrong on this one, Professor! The (mythical) conservative war against science is nothing more than A) conservative opposition to human embryo farming and B) a very mild request that alternatives to materialistic evolution be given a hearing in science class.
Being good Marxists, the moonbat leftist blogosphere knows that a lie often repeated will be believed, and that the best way to mask one's own sins is to accuse one's rivals of being the sinner. So as the left wars against science, they shout over and over that the right is doing it.
They also count on infiltrating this claim into the conservative blogosphere and into our consciousness through repetition, until we believe it ourselves.
What's wrong with hearing this in Sunday school?
Actually, they have a lot more ammo. than that, but some of them aren't the fundamentalists' fault. Global warming is one. And the left made their own war on science in the 90's. The 'war against science' was once our issue, and it could still be.
This is something I recently posted on pandasthumb.org, after FReeper curiosity asked me over for a little rumble. We figured two conservatives should be able to take on 20 or so liberals. :-)
Some historical perspective here.I came of age in the science wars of the late 80s. I remember vividly attending a faculty party in 1988 where virtually the entire body present declared allegiance to Jesse Jackson, for a variety of vapid idiotic reasons. I couldn’t believe it. I’d lived in Massachusetts under Dukakis’s governorship, and while I didn’t agree with him 100%, I respected him as a competent governor of unimpeachable integrity, and a competitive centrist candidate for the presidency (this was beforee the campaign self-destructed in late summer). But then, one of the faculty present assured me that the very idea of scientific objectivity was racist, sexist and heterosexist, and the others nodded solemnly in agreement.
Fast forward to the nineties, where one feminist scholar proclaimed that phsyicists had neglected hydrodynamics because of fear of menstrual flow; where other scholars on the left were promoting ‘ethnomathematics’; where Roberta Achtenberg, Clinton’s appointee at HUD, was giving merit raises for membership in ethnic and leftist organizations; where in schools we were getting ‘whole math’ and ‘whole language’ and huge dollops of multicultural twaddle. Postmodernism ruled the academic left, and was being pushed on public schools.
Ten years later, the boot is on the other foot. The Religious Right has discovered and embraced some parts of postmodernism. The same kooky ideas used to attack science from the left in the 90’s are now being used to attack it from the right this decade. Yes, far more Republicans are pro-creationism/ID. But a substantial part of the left still rejects science as a privileged, white male heterosexist discourse. They’re just out of power, and quiet for the moment. So you’ll pardon me if I don’t run leftwards to look for support against the fundies.
This country badly needs secular conservatism, because if the right/left split becomes a Christian/secularist split, elections become religious wars, and religious wars are far nastier than arguments over taxes and the deficit. Bashing secular conservatives because you’re liberal is no smarter than bashing Christian evolutionists because you’re atheist. You may not agree with them, but you need them.
The GOP has been far smarter than the Dems, except perhaps Bill Clinton, in building coalitions. They are currently splintering, mostly because of the hubris of religious right. This will be a useful reversal for the GOP and will lead to a temporary advantage for the Democrats. While your adversary is in the process of self-destructing, why would you want to intervene?
As a secular conservative, this thread reminds me why I’m conservative. It would be far better to remind me why I’m secular.
BTW, intruding religious beliefs into science class is not a 'mild request' in the minds of scientists.
The really irritating thing about this is that they are well meaning good people so I can't really even be mad at them but they are doing great harm.
When you get something that stands up under scrutiny as science, it can go into science class.