by Jack Cashill

News Talk 980 KMBZ   (Year: 1999)
Courtesy of the Cashill Newsletter  - July 26, 1999

Dang if those snake-handlers are at it again.

Just when you thought that the triumphant moderates of the Republican Party had made Kansas safe for the status quo, along comes Steve Abrams from Arkansas City--wherever the hell that is--taking about CREATION, the origins of life, evolution, all that messy, immoderate stuff.

Hadn’t he seen Inherit The Wind? Didn’t he watch Spencer Tracy hand those peckerwoods their hash?

Case closed, right?

Wrong.

Abrams and his allies on the state Board of Education have risked a chorus of ridicule and the chagrin of respectable Kansas to confront evolution head on.

The subject has induced in the state’s faint-hearted governor, Bill Graves, great consternation and concern. Says the Gov ominously of this debate, It certainly causes people to reexamine the question of the importance of the board in our efforts to make our public education system the finest that it can be. In real English, this means that if the people keep electing such white trash to the state board of education, Graves just might deep six the board and the democratic process with it.

The local media establishment is egging him on. Laura Scott, The Kansas City Star’s eminently proper editorialist, wants Graves to send these yahoos packing and believes he would have the pulse of the public on this matter were he to do so. Scott prefers the cozy and incestuous Missouri model. There, the Governor appoints the board, and the board elects a commissioner. Were Kansas to do the same, those folks who dare to question accepted scientific theory or reject progressive changes would have no say beyond their presumed trailer parks.

NO DIVINE INTERVENTION

One problem: the pulse of the public may be a whole lot fainter than Scott thinks. Though an ardent Darwinian, the late TV astronomer Carl Sagan acknowledged as much. According to Sagan, only 9% of the American public accepted what he saw as the central finding of modern biology, namely that human beings have evolved by natural processes from a succession of more ancient beings with no divine intervention along the way. As Sagan well understood, It was the no divine intervention part that soured the American people, 90% of whom believe in God.