3/4ths of Senate GOP Doesn't Believe in Science -- When Did Republicans Go Completely Off the Deep End?

(LP note: This semester I am teaching Introduction to Film to 187 college students, and I guarantee that such an undertaking is a lot easier than attempting to teach 47 U.S. Senate Republicans about global climate change, a subject on which, like film, I am fairly well versed. The reason: At ages 18, 19 and 20, students are quite open to discerning the differences between fact and fiction. Yet for some reason, some people as they grow older lose the ability to make that distinction. Is this a strange manifestation of becoming a certain brand of politician? Perhaps the answer is, as Upton Sinclair stated so eloquently, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.")

The Tea Party and its allies had made it unacceptable to the GOP base to be anywhere except pandering to the anti-science crowd.

March 22, 2011
Robert Benson
Miller-McCune via AlterNet

You’ve got to go back to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 for a precedent to the anti-science mania that is currently sweeping the GOP. Then, the issue was teaching Darwin’s work on evolution in the schools. Today, the issue is global warming. Then, as now, large numbers of politicians tapped into the stratum of popular culture that simply rejects science as the basis for public or personal decisions. The chief prosecutor of high school teacher John Scopes, William Jennings Bryan, gloated that literal interpretation of the Bible trumped scientific knowledge. This resonated with large masses of ordinary folks, the ones H. L. Mencken and the liberal press were calling “yokels” and “morons.”

Turns out the yokels and morons won, at least for a generation. Scopes was found guilty of violating the Tennessee law that prohibited teaching evolution, and his conviction (though later overturned on a technicality) galvanized the anti-evolution movement for years. Politicians came pouring in. Scores of resolutions were introduced in state legislatures and school boards all over the country, setting back the teaching of evolution for decades until logic and reason and the scientific method gradually reasserted themselves in the culture.

(More here.)