Cell Biologist Robert Bevins for Governor

Via Media Czech, a letter so passionately rational and creatively brilliant it should make Cowardly Waste of Oxygen Steve Beshear shrivel up and disappear.

Georgetown College biology professor Robert Bevins writes:

Dear Governor Beshear.

It was with great sadness that I learned of the severe injury done to the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s reputation. It is a sad day when Kansans can look down on Kentucky, that at least Kansas is not trying to attract an amusement park catering to the unscientific concept of young earth creationism.

Worse still, Kentucky is offering tax incentives to attract further development by Answers in Genesis, a group that can only further decrease our reputation as a state that values higher learning. All this in a state that is home to such treasures of paleontology as Big Bone Lick and the rich history of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history are visible to anybody who bothers to look at every road that cuts through a hill.

It wouldn’t be a slap in the face to all of my fellow alumni of the University of Kentucky, devaluing the doctoral diploma that I proudly display in my office and denigrating the verifiable and evidence based science taught in our land grant universities and private colleges if Kentucky wasn’t looking to help fund an ethically bankrupt amusement park. The presence of the Creation “Museum” is embarrassment enough, but to know that my tax dollars may help to fund its expansion, when researchers at UK and University of Louisville face tight budgets while performing ground breaking scientific research, it is simply too much.

Today, you helped to tarnish my hard won degree with the scorn of the academic community. In an instant, my years of scholarship became worth a tiny little bit less. I will have to defend my state as I once did as a child. “Yes, we wear shoes,” becomes, “No, we aren’t all stuck in a scientific stone age.”

What hue and outcry would there be if Ken Ham’s execrable organization was teaching children that God’s way was to learn that left and right are actually right and left? And if you don’t follow the Ham’s specific and narrow interpretation of biblical direction, society will collapse entirely. This is the scientific equivalent of creationism. Students come prepared to ignore anything taught in biology classes, and no level of evidence will convince them that learning about how life evolves is of value, but will guarantee their damnation.

Imagine then, students unable to read their English texts from left to right, as their interpretation of those directions means that no book can make sense to them. Students walking through a line in the cafeteria, gathering their food in their hands and finally depositing it on a tray. Students inoculated against evidence don’t even know that their educational skills are stunted until they are faced with an honest presentation of evolution at the college or university level.

Perhaps saddest of all of this is that the tens millions of dollars already spent on this monument to prideful ignorance goes not to feed the hungry or clothe the poor (or even to clothe the hungry) but to enrich the purveyors of a plainly dishonest interpretation of all types of scientific evidence, biological, chemical, physical and astronomical.

Read the whole thing.