State Sen. Mike Fair, Leading Sh**muffin Candidate, Has More Fun Creationist Plans For SC Schools

 
 Exciting news in the 2014 race for Legislative Shitmuffin of the Year! An anti-evolution set of science education standards sponsored by one of our leading candidates, South Carolina state Sen. Mike Fair, has passed in committee, and will now go to the state Board of Education for consideration. The standards would require science teachers in the state to "teach the controversy" about the theory of evolution through natural selection. And while the best answer would simply be to say "among scientists, there is no controversy about the reality of evolution," the bill would actually require inclusion of non-science in science classes, for the sake of providing equal time for myth and religion. You know, for the sake of the kids.

Sen. Fair first came to the attention of Yr Wonkette in March, when he blocked a bill, suggested by a smart eight-year-old girl to her state representatives, that would have named the wooly mammoth as South Carolina's state fossil . Fair placed a hold on the bill for its failure to mention that all fossils were formed during Noah's Flood some 4,000 years ago. Shortly thereafter, Fair also led a move to cut funding for state universities that he claimed were "recruiting" lesbians by sponsoring a gay lady comedian show.

In arguments for the new science standards, Fair insisted that he was merely promoting open debate, albeit open debate between science and made-up stuff:

"We must teach the controversy," Fair said. "There's another side. I'm not afraid of the controversy. ... That's the way most of us learn best."

While it is indeed tempting to offer Sen. Fair the chance to test the theory of gravity versus the theory of levitation through sustained meditation by pushing him out of an airplane, instead we'll just hope that the Board of Education has more sense than the Education Committee. Haha, actually, let's see about that levitation thing one more time...

Still, credit where it's due: Rob Dillon, a biology professor at the College of Charleston, gamely insisted before the committee that

"There are no scientific arguments that discredit natural selection ... There are exactly zero scientific arguments that discredit natural selection. What there are is about 10,000 religious arguments that seek to weaken natural selection."

Nice try science man, but until you show Sen. Fair a duck evolving into a crocodile, he is pretty sure he's got the evidence on his side.

Consider the excellent scientific argument that he made a month ago on Twitter, which is where morons go for peer review. In response to a critic's claim that "there is zero physical evidence that anything from the bible is true. Physical Evidence for evolution is all around us," Fair simply pointed out this irrefutable fact:

Oooh, evolution, YA BURNT! Ain't no way that the eye can be explained by evolution, unless of course you watched Neil deGrasse Tyson's reboot of Cosmos or read a little bit of science about exactly why the eye is a lovely proof of evolution -- and if anything, the human eye is a rather crappy adaptive compromise of an organ that evolved to see really well underwater, but is merely OK seeing through air. Not that Sen. Fair would find any of that more than clever speculation by people who hate God.

Incidentally, for what little good it may do, now that her bill has been shut down by the ironically named Sen. Fair, young Olivia McConnell and her mom have started a Change.org petition calling on the SC legislature to take another crack at naming the Columbian Mammoth as the official state fossil. We'd really like to hope that her proposal will be helped along by the extraction of certain other fossils embedded in the state House and Senate this fall.

[ Post and Courier via RawStory / Motherboard / Change.org ]