John Calvert lies about KCFS at AEI

I don’t use the word “lie” loosely. I know it means deliberately saying something that one knows not to be true.

But in this case, I am willing to claim that John Calvert lied to the audience at his presentation at a conference hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. this past week. I hope to write more about Calvert’s presentation there, which was in conjunction with a speech by Barbara Forrest, but here I want to concentrate on one comment made by Calvert concerning Kansas Citizens for Science.

Here’s what Calvert said at the AEI Conference.

The strategy of the opposition was revealed in a memo that was accidentally published in February by the media and public relations office of Kansas Citizens for Science, the organization which has cloned itself around the country and works very closely with the National Center for Science Education.

(my emphasis)(Audio captured from a video clip on the CSPAN website.)

Now the “memo” in question was actually a post on the KCFS Public Discussion forum. It was not “accidentally published,” but rather was a personal post by KCFS Board member Liz Craig as part of a discussion about the Kansas Board of Education. (The discussion was not even about Calvert’s ID Minority – it was about the six creationist state BOE members.)

Calvert knows this was not an “accidentally published memo”, because he and his ID Minority group published a “To Whom It May Concern” paper about this on May 2 in which they clearly quoted the post, which ends with

Posted by Liz Craig, Member no 70 KCFS .org Discussion Forum Posts: 171 | From: Kansas | Registered: Jan 2005 | IP: Logged

Furthermore, during Bill Harris’ testimony at the Kansas Hearings, Calvert directly pointed out that Harris had given a copy of the above post to the state Board of Education, and Harris put the post on the overhead.

For Calvert to now be telling people that this was an “accidentally published memo” is a lie. He knows what is was – a post by an individual on a public discussion forum. It was not a “memo” and it was not “accidentally published.”

There is no excuse for this. My hope is that by making this public here, Calvert will perhaps be dissuaded from continuing to embellish this story with false statements.