Notes from Evil Bender

Pat Hayes at Red State Rabble posted a brief history of the Discovery Institute’s newest tactic today. It’s a must-read. Check it out!

Hayes explains,

When Judge John Jones ruled, in December of 2005, that intelligent design isn’t science and the only real effect of the Dover school board’s ID policy was to advance religion, the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based intelligent design advocacy group, found itself with a problem on its hands.

Discovery’s strategy, its very raison d’etre, had been to promote a renamed and re-branded creationism as science in order to skirt a damaging series of court rulings, most prominently the 1987 Supreme Court Edwards v. Aguillard decision, in order to bring both God and Genesis back into the nation’s public school science classes.

Defeated in the courts, hemorrhaging allies, losing local elections and failing to produce any real science, what is the DI to do?

Discovery’s Plan B has popped up with increasing frequency over a number of months, but got its official launch with speeches in Washington and Philadelphia earlier this week by Discovery fellow John West that quickly cut the Nazi’s six million victims to “hundred of thousands.”

According to West, “Darwinism” is responsible for “the eugenics movement that sterilized scores of thousands of Americans deemed unfit in the early decades of the last century, the concurrent rise of the abortion movement, and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of supposed social undesirables by the Nazis in Germany.”

Of course this would be the latest plot of these dishonest psuedoscholars: Godwin’s law exists because people call “Nazi” when defeated in legitimate argument. But in reality Darwin is no more to blame for such atrocity than is Jesus Christ, whose teachings the Nazis appropriated to make their case.

More damning than this juvenile and desperate new strategy, though, is the true history of the DI’s leadership:

In tracing the history of Christian fascism in the United States Hedges explains the seminal role played by Rousas Rushdooney, the founder of the Dominionism, the theology behind Christian Reconstructionism.

Rushdooney “dismissed the number of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust as an inflated figure and his theories on race echoed Nazi Eugenics,” according to Hedges.

“The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture and the discipline and selective breeding this faith requires…,” Rushdooney wrote. “The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his heredity has been governed by radically different considerations.”

And what is the connection between the Dominionists fascism and the DI?

None other than Howard Ahmanson, a wealthy Californian who is heir to the Home Savings bank fortune. In the ‘70s Ahmanson joined Rushdoony’s Christian Reconstructionist movement and served as a board member of Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation for over ten years.

Ahmanson currently serves on Discovery’s board of directors and is its largest contributor. His gift of $1.5 million provided the seed money to organize Discovery’s Center for Science and Culture.

So, as West, Weikart and the other Discovery fellows go about their business, speaking their codespeak, linking Darwin and evolution to Hitler, they draw their pay from modern American fascists, Holocaust deniers, racists, homophobes, and apologists for the Nazi eugenics.

That’s Discovery’s disturbing legacy.

That’s a direct connection, my friends, between the DI and those whose stated goal is to make America into a Christian Theocracy. Unlike Darwin, whose ideas were misused by those seeking any justification for the evil they wished to commit, the DI is willingly taking funding from those whose goal is to take our country over.

But remember, folks, Intelligent Design has nothing to do with religion.