Ah, creationism; no matter how you dress it up, it’s still a steaming pile of horse shit. Every year it’s the same thing: a group of ignorant and highly religious parents become upset their children are actually receiving an education as to how life adapts and changes over time, and their reaction is to try and insert their creationist materials (which they hilariously call “intelligent design”) into classrooms. Once they start doing that, it becomes necessary to get the courts involved, and school boards with small budgets spend huge sums of money in the ensuing legal battles (remember the Dover trial? It cost 2 million bucks, and I’m sure lots of schools would be dying for that kind of money).

Now while big states like Texas get all the attention, Louisiana has decided it too wants to join in on all the fun. A number of citizens, backed by the Louisiana Family Forum (hey look, another conservative org with the word “family” in it), are attacking the state’s biology textbooks because they are teaching “too much evolution”.

Darrell White also told the Advocate that the textbooks don’t comply with the anti-evolution law known as the “Louisiana Science Education Act,” which the Family Forum helped write and successfully lobbied for in 2008. The LSEA instructs educators to promote “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” It also allows teachers and school districts to use “supplemental textbooks,” which are just code words for creationist and pro-intelligent design materials.

The losers in this whole thing are the kids, who as a consequence of all this nonsense end up having a shitty education. While Americans continue to wrestle with the incompatibility of their religion and objective reality, the rest of the world is passing them by at the speed of light. It’s hard to imagine what influence all of this “debate” will have on these students as they enter the global marketplace, but it’s not likely to be very good. How can you survive in a knowledge-based economy when your citizens keep filling their heads with superstitious bullshit?