Darwin on Trial, Take Two

"The last time we mixed religion and politics, people got burned at the stake."

~ George Carlin

So, it's that time of year again. In Los Angeles, the birds are changing colour and falling from the trees. In the District of Columbia, the Republicans are sitting down with the planet's economic stability for a game of Russian Roulette. In Ottawa, Stephen Harper is still mulling over the idea of allowing American police to enforce American law on Canadian soil. And in Texas, the state's Board of Education is having a hard look at science textbooks, and asking why there's all this fluff about evolution and other heretical nonsense, but not one word about the absolute truth of how God snapped his fingers and made the world.

And people wonder why I'm a cynic. The theory of evolution, as written in "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin, has been challenged since Day One in every conceivable manner possible. Tennessee v. Scopes in 1925 (better known as the Scopes Monkey Trial) was the first well-known legal showdown between the two sides - and ended with John Thomas Scopes being fined $100 (the equivalent of about $1300 today) for violation of the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in any state-funded school. This stood until cases like Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968 put the first cracks in creation being taught in schools, and ended with Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987.

And things sat, and they simmered, never breaching the surface, but like the One Ring of Sauron, knowing its time would come again. And in 2005, it came back with a vengeance. One little town in Pennsylvania suddenly found itself besieged by its itself, with the eyes of the world watching the Next Big Fight, Kitzmiller v. Dover. In the aftermath of it, a lot of people found their own families to be unwelcome company, a town called a cease-fire to go and lick its wounds, and the argument that religion has a place in science classes was thought to be ended once and for all.

But as the Wise Man says, "...nothing ever really ends, does it?" Because this time, the problem is potentially so much bigger. Due to the number of children in its school system, national publishers write design the textbooks for the Texas market. Which means, other states that want other textbooks will have to scrounge for what's left, make do with what they've got, or place their own orders for completely different textbooks, increasing the cost as a result. And with so much of the country's education system woefully under funded, complicated by three billion dollars in cuts from the sequester, may leave schools with very little in the way of other options.

Looks like the Cracks of Doom didn't work as Frodo had intended.

Elephants and Lemmings

"You know your party's in trouble when you read this: A: The rape guy lost. B: Which one?"

~ Alec Baldwin

And thus ends another election cycle in the United States, and with it a plethora of lessons to take to heart. To start off the list is Todd Akin, the now former Republican candidate for Missouri's 2nd Congressional District, and his lessons regarding the anatomical defenses of women to guard against becoming pregnant as a result of rape. Needless to say, the fiery death of this lesson, and Akin's political career as a result, was bright enough to see from orbit.

Next is Richard Mourdock, the defeated Republican senate candidate for Indiana, who many would say led himself to the gallows when he stated that a pregnancy that resulted from rape was 'a gift from God.' I will submit that I have known two women who became pregnant as the result of a rape, and carried their pregnancies to the full term, and none who chose an abortion. This fact can easily be skewered by the fact both girls were in their early teens, and their families forbid them to have an abortion, despite the girls' pleas to the contrary. Now, I may be only a simple male, and relatively unable to fully understand the mental trauma of rape, but situations like this don't seem to ring of divine providence.

The list goes on, across a wide range of topics, from lunar bases to 'job creators,' but I think the point can be made simply from looking at the psychology behind these two ideas, and the psychology of the party itself.

Many years ago, many more than I care to count, I first learned about the animals used to symbolize the Democrats and Republicans. One was symbolized by the elephant, a strong but nurturing animal, aged and wise. The other was an ass. I thought these two were a very fitting representation of the two American parties - until I realized I had it backwards. The Republicans have disjointed themselves so much from the mood of the United States as a whole so much that to my eyes, they can't help but look like a bunch of braying donkeys.

The problem the Republicans face is one of fundamental values. Even in generally hardened Republican strongholds, previous attempts at so-called 'personhood amendments' to write into law that life begins at conception (effectively equating abortions to homicide) failed miserably, and yet they still had several people running for office that blasted the airwaves with promises they would allow for no abortions in cases of rape, incest, or the health and survival of the mother. It was surprising to me, a vociferous defendant of a woman's right to elect for abortion, that so many people would thus choose to vote for a party whose presumptive leader, Willard 'Mitt' Romney (yes, Willard is his given name) sided with this policy more times than he denounced it. And with this, we come to the heart of the matter.

Mitt Romney raced back and forth so often between mutually exclusive points of view that it's a small wonder he made it past the primaries early this year. (Speaking of which: Yeti, I think I still owe you that $20 from betting Rick Perry would be the Republican candidate.) In his defense, he really had no choice, if choice it was at all. At the same time he had to appear acceptable to those Democrats that may be receptive to a different direction from Barack Obama and, as Kelsey Grammer said on an episode of 'The Simpsons,' '...a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king.' And the direct result of this was him tripping over his own feet time and time again, giving the Democrats more ammunition than they could use.

So the question becomes how the Republicans will act in the future. They spent the last two years, at least, since Mitch McConnell's notorious 'one-term President' remarks, obstructing everything that could breathe new life into the American economy. Will this become the norm for how they conduct themselves going forward? Worse yet is the question that prompts me to write this diatribe: do they have a choice? The Republicans have effectively, and for far more reasons than I've listed here, labelled themselves as a fanatical group of right-wing zealots. In this election cycle, it's become more and more apparent that this is the behaviour their base expects of them. Birtherism still rears its ugly head from time to time, and their demagoguery of 'socialist policies' that we Canadians treasure above all else, our health care system chief among them, continues a rampant charge. The Republicans in the end have no choice but to follow the policies demanded upon by those that elect them.

In the end, I can't help but consider the Republicans going forward to be a group of lemmings, walking across a tightrope stretched over the Grand Canyon, with a pack of wolves waiting on the other side. They can follow their instincts, trying to appease 50.1% of the voting population in their own radical way, and run the risk of falling off the rope. Or, they can fight their instinct, break conformity, and run on policies that will in many cases run contrary to political doctrine in their party, only to be torn to shreds by the wolves in their own party.

I will grant that some of them will make it over the rope and past the fangs - it's a near inevitability. What worries me is that one day, one of the more fanatical, and potentially psychotic ones, may manage to run the gauntlet and move into 1600 Pennsylvania. One of them nearly made it four years ago, and only needed a 72-year-old cancer survivor to win the election, and have his heart conk out to reach the pinnacle of power. Now, as a Canadian, I find myself asking if that is the kind of person I want guarding the world's largest nuclear stockpile?

May God grant me the opportunity to move to New Zealand.

Must it be Always the Same Song?

"Should we have one politician who thinks not of his future, but thinks of his morals, it would be the largest cataclysm to reach any government, and we would long after remember it as the greatest thing ever."

~ Codex Anima

I will, and have on frequent occasion, conceded that I don't like many politicians. It's not that they lie about everything, or that they make campaign promises that never get fulfilled. It's because of the reason they do these things that I generally dislike them: survival.

Now, let me explain, as a politician once put it to me. A person goes into politics because they see a system that needs to be changed, or because they see things in their country which they believe can be changed for the better, only to find out that none of the politicians who represent them are willing to sign on with their ideals. (This is a hypothetical scenario only intended to represent a percentage of those of good quality in political office - the rest of them are Conservatives.)

So, they beat the campaign trails, they make their enheartened speeches about what they see wrong, and how they intend to change it. Then what happens next but the damn fool gets elected. He gets to Ottawa / Washington, DC / London / et cetera, only to find the reason no ideas he put forward made it anywhere. Every politician has their own agendas, which they frequently sell parts of, either by casting out their campaign promises, or by voting for/against certain agendas of other politicians, in order to accrue those critical votes to get their One Big Idea through with at least 30% of it still intact.

And more often than not, their One Big Idea still gets beat down, or never comes up for vote before they're forced out of office for not fulfilling their campaign promises. (You notice how so many politicians plunge daggers into each other over campaign promises broken?) So their great plans to benefit society are laid to waste simply because other politicians tell them they need to be enticed.

Then there's the lobbyists, the backroom cloak-and-dagger types who whisper in the ears of politicians to get what their corporations want in return for massive campaign contributions, or perhaps positions on their Board of Directors when they leave public office. Brian Mulroney himself sits on the Board of Directors for seven major corporations, which by my research is a record for any Canadian politician. These lobbyists come from places such as the pharmaceutical companies, the modern-day oil barons, and many other such places. And the politicians listen, and vote the way the corporations want them to. (And you say corporations don't run the world?)

But just today, I saw something, a glimmering beam of hope shining from the one place I never expected to see it: the United States Congress. Of course, it came from a Democrat - would you expect anything else? John Boccieri (D-Ohio) stood before the cameras of CNN today regarding President Obama's 'Health Care Reform' while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with three of his constituents who have been denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions. He told the cameras on live television that, while it would most likely be political suicide to do so, he will be voting for the bill to pass.

Not his exact words, granted, but close enough. An American politician, even a Democrat, stating that he was going to gamble his political career on something that would be of benefit not just to his constituents, but to the country as a whole. In all my life, I have never heard a politician openly say he was going to vote a certain way simply because his own ethics demanded it so. To be quite honest, I thought I was dreaming at first. Then I accidentally dropped my cigarette on the back of my hand.

All I can really say beyond this point is that I sincerely hope, for the sake of those he represents, that he survives the next election, and keeps his morals with him. Who knows, the type of future we all so desperately hope politicians can bring just started on CNN today.

But I still kind of doubt it.