Creationism—GOPs arugmentum ad populum

(HT to Nisbet…really)

With the “choice” of Governor Palin as the vice presidential candidate, the GOP must now face up to questions about the teaching of creation myths is public school science classes. The new talking point? “It’s a local issue.” Science is local?

Lucky for the GOP, Governor Pawlenty wasn’t chosen for veep, given his responses to Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press. Pawlenty apparently missed the whole Dover thing, wherein ID was shown to be Creationism, and Creationism was found to be “teaching religion” and not appropriate for public school science classes.

Pawlenty brought up the “competing theories” argument, and also managed to contradict himself by saying that evolution and Creationism are “competing theories” and that “intelligent design is dismissed [in the scientific community]”.

My wife is a teacher. She’s taught elementary school at both public and parochial schools. She’s a very talented teacher, and has taught science to hundreds of kids. You know what? She doesn’t know enough about creation myths to teach them in a science class. She does, however, know enough biology. In the parochial school, creation myths were always dealt with in religion classes. Even some religious schools seem to understand the difference between myth and science.

If we can turn away from Palin and her kid’s wombs for a while, we can take the governor to task for her statements about mixing religion and politics and make her clarify her stance. A candidate’s uterus may be off limits, but not her politics.