Free Republic

What about those who believe "seperation of church and state" is a valid legal interpretation of the Constitution? Can they point to Supreme Court rulings and be justified? Anyone who thinks that phrase is in the Constitution needs to get pushed back to Civics 101.

Goddamn right. I am an admitted leftist and also a philosophy major but nothing angers me like pseudo-philosophers like Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Eco, Foucault, Husserl, Zizek, Adorno, Marx, Lacan and others being past off as thoughtful analysis, even philosophy. Even worse is when otherwise intelligent people get pulled into the snares of postmodernist thought (a term I use to describe pretty much anything related to continental philosophy, so areas like phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, real post-modernism, deconstructionism, most feminist works, and critical theory). All of them are intellectual rubbish. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I do not have the time to study all of their works and point out all of the failures in scholarship, but luckily we have people like EO Wilson and Alan Sokal (who initiated the Sokal Affair and wrote Fashionable Nonsense afterwards, a GREAT read).

Because the only thing that has legal authority is the First Amendment...right?

Homosexuality and transgender lifestyles are "learned skills" as are pedophiles and child molesters. It's their lifestyle.

How exactly does one learn to be gay anymore than one learns to be straight? Did someone tell you or force you to think the opposite sex was attractive? I've never heard someone really claim that this happened. Furthermore that claim cannot hold weight under analysis. If being gay is learned, then how exactly did this practice begin? Either there were gay people from the beginning of time and they have constantly been perverting people ever since, unlikely considering the intolerance of previous centuries. Or what?

What I still don't understand is, why is your Republican Party embroiled in this? Over here, the Conservative Party is staunch in its support of both enterprise and science--how can you support one without the other?

You've got two main contributers to this issue (in my estimation). One, the poor state of basic scientific education. I do not mean what is the scientific method. The SM is important, but merely memorizing the steps and not fully grasping the application of it is pointless. The basic philosophy of science that underlies good scientific reasoning is also not even mentioned, discussed, or elluded to in basic education; so you'll have mainstream newspapers proclaiming that science has proven something or the other. Nevermind science is not in the business of proving anything. There is evidence for a theory or claim, and degrees of confidence that should accompany that evidence, but there isn't definitive proof of anything. This hurts the scientific enterprise when something is "disproven", say the recent trend of serious psychologists to reject multiple-personality disorder's either prevalence (because a huge portion of the case are diagnosed by a very few doctors) or existence or something along the lines of diety discoveries (omega-3 fatty acids' benefit for the heart have recently been called into question). So people cannot even understand what is being told to them, and absolutely do not have a justifiable critical eye towards such matters.

The second big issue is political power. It is relatively easy to try to gain the support of the fundamentalist Right in America. The Republican party has been exploiting the fundamentalists' distrust of liberals and been milking that support through talking points. So now you have so many people who once hearing the word "evolution" immediately shut down all rational thought (this nasty problem effects both sides of the issue). "Evolution", "abortion", "family values", "morality" BAM. You've either got the support of a portion of America (that seems to be in the majority) or you've alienated the other big portion. These people have short attention spans, and little foresight for what problems may arise from their positions down the road (e.g. cutting federal grants into both applied research, like medicine or whatnot, and to pure research will most likely result in a lack of innovation down the road; but of course this outcome is not absolutely certain).

Miller has an extremely condescending opinion toward Americans if he thinks they are too stupid to understand he is talking about "evolution" when he asks if humans "developed from earlier species of animals"

It isn't a matter of stupidity, it's a matter of valid polling techniques. The purpose of the phrasing is to rule out any immediate non-rational response to the word "evolution". If you really want some psychological studies on the effects of phrasing on memory recall (and the accuracy of those memories) then I can post some later today. But basically the issue is that certain words have varying connotations depending on who you ask, so if you can accurately rephrase the word into some non-connotative phrase then you are more likely to get a more accurate return from your sample.

Both the atheist/spiritualist bozos and Muslims angrily pursue nihilism/paganism/idolatry, and detest those of us who pursue Judeo-Christian values.

Why would Atheists pursue paganism or idolatry? At least be consistant. You can have beliefs, especially beliefs in ethics, without a holy book commanding them.

Subsequently, I see no reason why they would ever accept Judeo-Christian values given that our beliefs insinuate that man is naturally given to evil temptations, and will be held accountable for sin in the afterlife.

Exactly! Many of us atheists are working to achieve justice in this life, and not sitting with our legs back awaiting judgment in the afterlife.

To the atheist/Muslim, there is no concept of sin, and therefore they oppose Jews/Christians who acknowledge that there is a difference between good and evil.

Sin is a concept that is inherently religious. Sin is to go against god so therefore it is of no surprise that atheists do not believe in sin.

Miss Malkin could paint a more strawman version of liberals, but then she wouldn't be believable.

Urban Dictionary entry for hooey