October 2006 TransGriot Column

‘Intelligent Design’ Is A GLBT Issue
Copyright 2006, THE LETTER


One of the things that pisses me off (besides Shirley Q. Liquor and the state of our nation) is when GLBT peeps toss out the ‘that isn’t a GLBT issue’ line to avoid thinking about various subjects or discussing sensitive ones such as racism in the GLBT community.

Over the last decade, scientists and educators have been fighting a pitched battle against ‘intelligent design‘. American fundamentalists have always poured Hateraid on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ and a century of scientific evidence supporting Darwin didn’t change their fundamental goal of eliminating it from public education. With the rise of the Religious Right in the early 80’s they allied themselves with those folks and developed the Creation Science/Intelligent Design argument as a slickly packaged attack on Darwin. Their attempts to inject intelligent design into public school curriculums have created federal court clashes in Louisiana, Arkansas and Pennsylvania.

Creation science is based on the biblical Book of Genesis and asserts that the earth is only 6000 years old. When it ran into resistance from the scientific, education, religious and legal communities it got respun into what is currently called ‘intelligent design.’ The gist of it is that life is so complex it couldn’t possibly have arisen from uncontrolled natural events.

Tell that to the Vatican’s chief astronomer, the Rev. George Cloyne. According to the Italian news agency ANSA, Father Cloyne stated that intelligent design "isn't science, even though it pretends to be." He argued that if it is to be taught in schools, then it should be taught in religion or cultural history classes, but not in a science curriculum.

Federal district judge John Jones agreed. In a court case initiated by eleven Dover, Pennsylvania parents angered by their local school board's decision to implement teaching of intelligent design, the Bush-appointed Lutheran judge in a 138-page opinion ruled in December 2005 that it was ‘a mere relabeling of creationism," intended to get around the 1987 judicial ban on teaching creationism as science in public schools. He also called it a "breathtaking inanity" that fails the test as science, castigated its proponents and said Dover's students, parents and teachers "deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom."

Those eight board members were all replaced in the November 2005 school board elections. Unfortunately the peeps in Kansas didn’t get Judge Jones’ message. Their conservative controlled State Board of Education recently mandated that intelligent design be taught in science classes there.

So what does this have to do with the GLBT community? As citizens we need to be paying attention to the composition of our school boards and what happens there. Formations of Gay-Straight clubs or combating bullying shouldn’t be our only involvement in public schools. In the face of studies that show US kids falling behind nations such as India and Japan we need more fact-based science curriculums in place, not faith based ones.

It’s also in the GLBT community’s best interests to ensure that quality public school education is widely available and continues to serve a diverse population of students and support those folks who fight to make that idea a reality. It’s no surprise that the anti-public education folks and the intelligent design proponents have the common thread of being bankrolled and supported by our fundamentalist opponents.

It is also only a matter of time before the reams of research being generated by the completion of the Human Genome Project blows up the major Religious Right attack argument that being gay is ‘a choice’. The Nazis began their persecution of Jews by using bogus theories and disseminating them as scientific facts. That propaganda has been repackaged by our opponents to attack the GLBT community and needs to be refuted ASAP. The scientific community will play an important role in that effort.

A minority group has to seize opportunities to build coalitions with other advocacy groups because we can’t do it alone. If we want help in the GLBT civil rights struggle with the radical fundies, then we must help others who are similarly besieged by them.