November 13, 2005
Spectrum\Bill Siedler
So, what's the matter with the Mat-Su Valley? In his 2004 book, “What's the Matter with Kansas?” humorist and social commentator Thomas Frank explores the 1999 decision (Frank describes it as a “barking idiocy”) of the Kansas Board of Education to delete references to macroevolution and the age of the earth from Kansas' science standards. It apparently did not matter to a majority of the board members that to biologists and biology teachers worldwide, that evolution is the bedrock upon which modern biology, and much of earth science rests.
According to Frank, what mattered to the Kansas board was that teaching evolution in public schools caused “'Teen drug use, the rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases, despair and suicide in teens, as well as youth violence.'” The 1999 decision was reversed, but on Nov. 8, the Kansas board voted 6-4 to redefine the term “science” so as to accommodate supernatural explanations (“God did it!”).
How did Kansas, or for that matter the Mat-Su Valley, come to where the teaching of evolution is attacked so publicly by people who choose to remain ignorant of how evolution makes sense of the natural world. Many have seen this coming from a long way off, but recent items in our Valley Frontiersman newspaper have made the issue impossible to ignore further.
First, there was a public discussion - in writing, and in cartoon form, courtesy of Chuck Legge - of the validity of a home-school science education, if the pupil gets his or her “facts” from a conspicuously Christian fundamentalist (read: “creationist”) text.
http://www.frontiersman.com/articles/2005/11/13/news/opinion/opinion2.txt