Red State Rabble on the dangers of the Discovery Institute's Plan B

I’d like to direct you all over to Red State Rabble to read Pat Hayes’ post this morning entitled “Discovery’s Disturbing Legacy.”

The ID movement has failed scientifically (never having got off the ground), in the courts, and at the ballot box in school Board elections at the state and local level. This has not fazed the Discovery Institute, which is now concentrating on the culture war tactic of associating science (“Darwinism”) with Nazism, eugenics and other cultural evils.

Pat writes,

Thwarted by the court in their central strategic objectives, increasingly shunted off to the side by the news media, at odds with their creationist allies, and unable to produce any credible science of their own, the Discovery Institute has now adopted a cynical Plan B: If you can’t build your own house, you may as well tear your neighbor’s down.

Discovery’s Plan B has popped up with increasing frequency over a number of months, but got its official launch with speeches in Washington and Philadelphia earlier this week by Discovery fellow John West that quickly cut the Nazi’s six million victims to “hundred of thousands.”

According to West, “Darwinism” is responsible for “the eugenics movement that sterilized scores of thousands of Americans deemed unfit in the early decades of the last century, the concurrent rise of the abortion movement, and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of supposed social undesirables by the Nazis in Germany.”

After listing other examples of Plan B in action, Pat notes,

If what Weikart, West, Coulter, and Discovery say is true, one might think that Jewish organizations would welcome their support. However, just the opposite is true.”

“Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people,” according to a statement issued by the Anti-defamation League when “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy” was aired.

“Trivializing the Holocaust,” said the ADL, “comes from either ignorance at best or, at worst, a mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war on the backs of six million Jewish victims and others who died at the hands of the Nazis.

“It must be remembered,” the ADL continued, “that D. James Kennedy is a leader among the distinct group of ‘Christian Supremacists’ who seek to ‘reclaim America for Christ’ and turn the U.S. into a Christian nation guided by their strange notions of biblical law.”

Now the DI is taking their road show to Europe:

Next week, Discovery is participating in the World Congress of Families in Warsaw. In doing so, they are joining with a motley crew of far-right anti-immigrant zealots who claim Muslims and other immigrants are contributing to the “demographic destruction” of Europe, extreme homophobes, misogynists, and anti-abortion fanatics who, holding life sacred, call openly for the murder of abortion providers.

Members of the European Parliamentary Working Group on Separation of Religion and Politics have protested the conference saying that several people scheduled to speak at the three-day conference have taken positions that clash with the European Charter of Fundamental Rights.

This is the real “Intelligent Design” movement at work. The “science” was meant to be a cover all along, and now that they are found out, there is no need for further subterfuge. The real issues are out in the open and on the table, and now that they are I think it is clear that it is more important than ever that these folks be resisted.

I encourage you to read Pat’s whole essay: Red State Rabble