US presidential candidate Mike Pence is— says Phil Plait at Slate— a creationist: Which is pretty much like being a witch, I guess.
You know anyone picked by Trump to be his running mate almost certainly will have a problem with established science, of course, but it turns out Pence is also a young Earth creationist. And one with a lot of conviction about it, too. In 2002, while a congressman from Indiana, he gave a short speech on the floor of Congress denying evolution, and used quite a few misleading, if not outright false, claims.
It’s a curious feature of US politics, as seen from Canada, that American media—in the face of serious present-day problems—continue raising a stink about what politicians believe about evolution.
I remember a Canadian political maven turning to me one day some years ago, with respect to a different campaign, and asking: Yes, but who cares how old that guy thinks Earth is? Why?
Who indeed? The broad collapse of legacy media can be usefully assessed from multiple directions, but the one that stands out for me is this: No one but them really cares about most of their issues, or else is on the other side.
That fact hit me forcefully in early 2015 when I witnessed a squawk of legacy media airheads obsessing over Wisconsin governor Scott Walker refusing to discuss where he “stood on evolution.”
No one but them likely cared and it was awful TV.
Walker gained his rep scrapping with public service unions. That’s what made him important. He wasn’t running for president of the Evolution Society.
A good way of unintentionally promoting bad government is to advance irrelevant issues over critical ones.
See also: Time Magazine quizzes Scott Walker’s high school science teacher on his evolution views
Added, based on some comments below:
Golly, do some people just not get it. My point is, who cares what some politician thinks about “evolution”?
Who cares whether he thinks there are space aliens out there or not?
These are not political issues.
By contrast: Climate change policies? The war on polio? Maintaining control over who gets plutonium? These are all genuine science political issues in the sense that a nation state will have agreements with other nation states about how to handle them, agreements that may include legislation and funding. Voter/taxpayer issues.
Convenient shorthand for someone trying to politicize evolution: Sponge looking for foundation support.
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