Deep dark secrets in South Carolina

Last week a Toledo Blade editorial called the Ohio State Board of Education “… a painful carbuncle on the posterior of state government …”. Demonstrating that Ohio doesn’t have a lock on governmental duplicity, a report in The State.com out of South Carolina tells us that a legislator plans to call two “experts” to advise a school oversight panel.

State Sen. Mike Fair has invited two experts to advise the school reform oversight agency, which is evaluating the standards for teaching the origins of life.

Fair said he promised the two advisers he would protect their identities to minimize scrutiny of their views and credentials prior to their appearance before an EOC subcommittee next week..

Experts who can’t be identified? Who have to be anonymous to prevent scrutiny of their credentials? I wonder if they’ll wear brown paper bags over the heads with those neat little eyeholes cut in them.

Between Senator Buttars of Utah pushing “divine design” and anonymous “experts” in South Carolina, it looks like there’s a mad race to the bottom out there in creationism land. But the newspapers are catching on. Of Buttars, the Salt Lake Tribune said

But every time the West Jordan Republican opens his mouth to address the subject, he removes all doubt about the fact that he has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.

…

Buttars’ constant references to the lack of a “missing link” or his insistence that he’s never seen a dog change into a cat display a towering ignorance of the subject. That would be his own business, and perhaps a source of comfort to him, were it not for the fact that he is trying to enshrine his willful misunderstandings into state law.

As Nick points out just below, one of the Disco Institute’s official goals is to have 10 states “rectify the ideological imbalance in their science curricula & include design theory”. Unfortunately, since there is no “design theory”, the freelancers out there in the world are taking the bit in their teeth and running straight to creationism. They’re not fooled at all by the Disco Institute’s rhetoric, it seems.

RBH

(Hat tip to Red State Rabble.)