I’m not going to rehash the main talking points, which we’ve covered before, but on stem cells, you might want to read Mooney’s book regarding the bogus scientific claims about the number of viable stem cell lines.

If you can find a WHO source advocating abstinence-only sex education (and I’m sure you know that’s what is meant by “abstinence-based”), please point to it.

“It is quite amusing how liberals treat Republicans like some sort of 18th century shaman cult emerging from some desert island with no knowledge of all the nifty new ideas the “educated” people have found.”

I wouldn’t associate shaman cults with the 18th century, myself. Actually, “cargo cult” is a much better metaphor. As has been discussed here before, today’s Republicans love technology, they just imagine the science behind it as a kind of magic which can be controlled by the appropriate use of ritual incantations and so on.

I don’t want to be rude, but that is a bit of magical thinking. I’ll be locked in a moving van for the next couple of days so won’t see any responses, but I’m blown away by this.

-DDT Myth – Republicans aren’t denying science. They are interpreting environmental group’s actions as a “ban” on DDT. And when you add up all the pressure against DDT, and the fact that outdoor spraying is still quite effective in many areas, you can get a fairly good argument here. It certainly isn’t cut and dried that they’re wrong. See Lambert’s site for the catfights in the comments.

Stem cells – These have nothing to do with science and is a purely moral argument. A tradeoff between morals and science.

Abstinencebased sex ed – If you are going to argue against abstinence-based sex ed, you aren’t just going up against the Reps, you’re going up against the WHO. Not many argue that abstinence ed doesn’t have a place in fighting AIDs and solving poverty.

(The big one)
-Climate Change – No one doubts that humans are causing some fraction of the change in the Earth’s climate. But there is still plenty of argument as to what that percentage is. If it is 50% do policies like Kyoto make sense? If it is 75% do they make sense? If it is 35%?

It is quite amusing how liberals treat Republicans like some sort of 18th century shaman cult emerging from some desert island with no knowledge of all the nifty new ideas the “educated” people have found.

The reason ID is energising the liberal base in a way that previous rounds of creationism did not is that it’s the model on which a whole range of Republican strategies have been formed, most obviously the denialist/contrarian campaign on climate change. ID is a hot topic partly becuase its the original and partly because it can be fought out at the local level.

As PZ Myers notes, and Chris Mooney documents, this kind of thing is now endemic across policy debates involving science (the DDT myth, stem cells, abstinence-based sex ed etc etc). It’s impossible now to be an orthodox Republican and support science (I assume this was Brendan’s point).

“I don’t know why members of the reality based community are so excited by the school board being voted out. People get voted out all the time.”

You have to understand where school boards sit in the context of American politics. School board elections are the most local and least visible of all elections, so hardly anyone pays attention to them or bothers to vote in them. Over the last 25 years, they’ve been the target of creationists and other far-right “stealth candidates” who want to introduce extremist views into the government and public schools. The creationists target school boards precisely because the public’s lack of interest means that a small, special interest group can swing the election.

The conventional wisdom is that it’s very difficult to stop this sort of thing because the “reality based community” is too apathetic and unorganized to mount an effective counter-campaign at such a small level. Futhermore, polls show that a healthy majority of Americans are okay with teaching creationism, so merely exposing their agenda is not enough to get them kicked out.

The Dover school board results do much to dispell that conventional wisdom. People might say they’re okay with teaching creationism when asked in a poll, but when it happens in their community and causes religious divisiveness, they think differently. And when pushed hard enough, rational people can organize effectively enough to counteract the zealotry of the creationists. The decisiveness of the election is a hopeful sign.

Of course no one should get too excited or read too much into this. It’s a good sign, not the end of religious right or anything.

Jet—most Democrat and Republican voters have no interest in the problems you raise, because their kids don’t go to those schools. They don’t go to ID teaching schools, either, but the prospect of creeping ID and issues like it, are a gift to the Dems, because they enable them to play to their wealthy liberal supporters, without having to threaten their pocket books (or their ability to get private schooling for their kids on public funds, which the kind of intervention required to fix schools with high concentrations of low income kids in them would threaten).

There isn’t an easy solution to the general problem of education. It is pretty easy to get an adequate school if you can pick or filter the students in some way using private schools, expensive houses in a school district, vouchers or other filters for parental involvement. Getting good schools with challenging students is a hard problem.

Keeping ID out of biology texts is not a hard problem.

I have news for you. Biology education for quite a few years now has already been seriously damaged because the cretinists and their useful idiots have intimidated many teachers and nearly all textbook publishers out of giving students any serious introduction to evolution- the conceptual core of biology. To anyone concerned with scientific literacy (or the lack thereof in the US population) this is a BIG BIG problem, one that is on or nearly on a par with the plight of inner-city schools in terms of serious problems in public education.

Nah, that’s just not true—this fight has been going on since Scopes. Here’s a chronology:

http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/3675_eight_significant_court_decisi_2_15_2001.asp

The ‘Epperson vs Arkansas’ decision involved not a law that permitted the teaching of a watered-down ‘Intelligent Design’ version of creationism but actually banned the teaching of evolution. The creationists have been giving ground for a century. From a position of trying to legally ban evolution and legally mandate creationism, they’ve fallen way back to merely trying for warning stickers or a highly diluted, decaffinated version of creationism (with only implicit religious implications) into the curriculum. Creationists have seized on I.D. from a position of weakness and, as the Dover election showed, even that’s not working out too well for them.

Is it appropriate to use the phrase ‘not a republican, just on the other side’ here?