This entire column from Richard Dawkins is worth reading:
There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.
[…]
The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.
A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.
It must be strange to be an educated European looking across the pond at the mess the United States has made of its political system, to marvel at the simple fact that, as Dawkins points out, for one of the major parties, willful stupidity is a prerequisite for higher office. Anyone who “doesn’t believe in” evolution (quotes because it’s not a belief) is either woefully misinformed or a fool.
In other Rick Perry news, he apparently wrote in his book that being gay is just like being an alcoholic — that it’s “your choice” whether or not to partake in either spirits or gay. (More willful stupidity.) I just find that comparison interesting, because the Cabaret at La Te Da in Key West, Florida, is a good place to buy some drinks, and considering it’s a gay establishment, might be a good place to meet a gay for sexytime. Rick Perry, or someone on his staff, ran up a tab of $78.26 back in 2009 at that fine gay bar. Maybe the two are linked in his mind?
[h/t Pharyngula]
