It looks like the conservative coalition is really coming apart at the seams. George Will and Charles Krauthammer both take on intelligent design, and it doesn’t come out well. Krauthammer speaks eloquently (I can’t believe I’m saying that) about the both the inadequacy of ID as science and the foolishness of pitting God against evolution and demanding an either/or belief:
Let’s be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological “theory” whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge — in this case, evolution — they are to be filled by God. It is a “theory” that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, “I think I’ll make me a lemur today.” A “theory” that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science — that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution — or behind the motion of the tides or the “strong force” that holds the atom together?….
….How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.
Will points out that the Republican Party as it exists now is no longer the party of fiscal responsibility and that it is driving away traditional conservatives. To that, I have to say “Duh”. Why did it take so long to figure that out?
“It does me no injury,” said Thomas Jefferson, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But it is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education. The conservative coalition, which is coming unglued for many reasons, will rapidly disintegrate if limited-government conservatives become convinced that social conservatives are unwilling to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies on the private institutions that mediate between individuals and government, and instead try to conscript government into sectarian crusades.
My parents are still hanging onto their belief in the party of the 1970’s. I’ve been warning them about the growing influence of the religious right for years, but they have discounted my comments as the ravings of a paranoid liberal. Now their party has been hijacked by anti-intellectual, pseudo-moralists who would like to turn the US government into a theocracy — but only if it is their theocracy, with laws based on their interpretation of the Bible and leaders in the mold of Jerry Falwell or James Dobson (shudder).
Both traditional conservatives and neocons have been happy to make a devil’s bargain with the religious right in order to gain power. They had no problem sacrificing the safety and well-being of certain segments of the population, particularly the LGBT community, so that social conservatives could rant about “family values” and turn out Republican voters to defend against the bogeymen of gay marriage and abortion on demand.
I guess Will and Krauthammer have decided they don’t want to live in the Theocratic Republic of America. I hope their followers pay attention. It’s about time they all wised up.