Opinion: Texas School Board Creationist Defends His [Lousy] Record

Let's get this straight right off the bat: young-Earth creationism is wrong. It's the wrongiest wrongness in the history of wrongitude. We know for rock-solid fact the Earth and the Universe are billions of years old, not thousands. Also, it's illegal — unconstitutional, even — to teach creationism as anything other than myth in public schools, since it's religion.

So you just know that reading an op-ed from Don McLeroy — an evangelistic creationist who was (was, thank heavens) the head of the Texas State Board of Education — trying to defend and spin the BoE's insertion of religion and far-right rhetoric into the state standards is going to be head-explodey.

And it is.

Mind you, this is the one and the same Texas BoE that has been fighting teaching kids about evolution tooth and nail, which downplayed the Big Bang theory, which took Thomas Jefferson out of the standards, which praised Joseph McCarthy, which screwed up the state standards so massively California issued a warning that it would be looking at what Texas is doing to textbooks very carefully. The very same BoE that had the gall to pass a resolution condemning textbooks they perceived as pro-Muslim while ramming fundamentalist religion into those same textbooks.…

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