The Missoulian’s anti-evolutionary essay

June 2, 2006 in Media, Religion

I was digging around the letters in the Gazette for signs of creeps and heroes, but apparently the paper has realized how I’m using its letter and has filtered all the interesting mail from its pages, leaving me to pore over corn syrup support and bison management and seat belt laws. Issues very important to the community, no doubt, but not exactly 4&20 fodder.

No, to get a good laugh, we have to turn to the Missoulian, and even dip back a week or so to the essay penned for the paper’s “Religion” section by the good – er, mediocre – Frenchtown pastor, Fred Emery, “Evolution Proponents Threaten Our Freedom.”

I made none of this up. I swear.

But if we reject the belief that our Creator gave us rights, not the government, then we could even end up like Nazi Germany. What protects us is our codified belief in creation and our Creator.That belief is under assault today by the belief in evolution. Evolution provides no protection, no guarantee of human rights. If evolution gains total ascendancy in America, the control of our rights shifts from our Creator to our government. Then a simple majority vote can take those rights away. It could happen here. Only America is founded on a belief in the Creator.

Good stuff, this. I don’t understand the connection between evolution and Godlessness. No one ever claimed that evolutionary theory disproves a God. Just that man is evolved from other organisms. Yes, this theory does contradict a few irrelevant and minor Biblical verses, but it wouldn’t be the first time science or reason or common sense did that. (Else we’d see an awful lot of folks around town with millstones hanging around their necks.)

Those seeking to remove references to God, Creator, and Jesus Christ from the public arena may not understand the danger that will unleash. Your rights, my rights, their rights could be lost. Nobody would be safe. Therefore, everyone should protect the belief in creation and Creator even if they don't personally share that belief. Every atheist should support creation.

Last time I checked, it was the Constitution that guaranteed our civil rights. Which Bush is infringing upon. And he’s a devout Christian. You know what I’m saying? I trust our legal system more than – well – guys like the author of this intellectual roadkill.

Stevensville’s John Winston wrote in a few days later to refute Emery’s claims, taking it a lot more seriously than I can, and spending more time thinking about the basic premises of Emery’s arguments.

[Emery] takes Jefferson's sole mention of a “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence and stretches it like Saran Wrap to cover a rambling string of contradictory statements, turning that single word into a “creation belief” on the part of the Founders.Jefferson was a Deist, which is nothing like Emery's sort of Christian. The Declaration of Independence was a “separation decree” from the English monarchy, not law. Creationism is never mentioned; simply that man's basic rights are inborn, not given by a despot's whim. “Creator” is a phrasing tool. “Creator” was neither an endorsement of creationism nor a condemnation of evolution, which theory did not exist in 1776.

The Declaration says: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Emery then leaps to an alternate-universe U.S. government, morphed into Hitler's Third Reich, all our rights gone because the theory of evolution has standing. How? Such standing rejects a “codified belief in creation and our Creator.”

There is no such “codified belief.” Such codification, i.e., a law, flies directly in the face of the Bill of Rights, which does codify the immunities of individual citizens. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Next, Emery loses all touch with reality: “Only America is founded on a belief in the Creator.” Even the Muslims found their theocracies on such a belief.

Finally, Emery wants his own theocratic Reich: “Our only guarantee is an imposed belief in a Creator who is bigger than government as the Declaration of Independence says.” No, it doesn't, and that concept is in total violation of the First Amendment.

Such are the political debates among Montanans. Really, why did the Missoulian even print Emery’s trash? The essay was poorly considered, poorly written, and…wrong.

In today’s “Links…” I posted to a graduate student who claimed that journalism is broken. It’s an important post, representing an idea that has been flying around the country in the past couple of decades. The style of contemporary journalism just doesn’t work — the Iraq War, the infringements on our rights by the administration, all these events have been abetted by traditional media sources. Not that the New York Times or the Washington Post or Time has been consciously aiding the administration’s lies, spin, and deceit (I wish I could say the same about Fox), it’s just that their “objective” approach forces them to weigh “both sides” equally and prohibits them from interpreting the facts, from telling us what the facts mean.

The most egregious example of how reporting has screwed up an issue is global warming. In the Fresh Air interview with Al Gore, Terry Gross mentions a study that monitored both scientific journals and traditional media outlets for articles on global warming. In the peer-reviewed scientific journals not a single author denied that global warming was influenced by human activity. However, in the traditional media outlets more than half the stories cited studies claiming that global warming was the result of a natural process. (Intelligent Discontent has a post about the study.)

Got that? A bunch of academic hacks and pay-for-results corporate shills produce reports of dubious scientific value, which are then given equal weight by newspapers and television in their striving for “objectivity.”

In other words, they got the facts wrong.

In a similar way, the Missoulian did a disservice to the community by running Emery’s essay. It’s shoddy. It’s specious. It’s wrong. It’s political. (Don’t think for a second that the anti-evolution crowd really cares about Creationism; they just want to force fundamentalist Christian doctrine into public schools.) It’s not a “legitimate” viewpoint. It’s not “balanced” or “objective” to print the incoherent ravings of a extremist propagandist. By printing the essay, the paper is validating the essay’s ideas, implying that’s it’s worthy of interest.

Let’s face it: traditional media doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. Even when journalists blog, like the Gazette’s Ed Kemmick, only sometimes do controversial or meaningful ideas get batted around. Most of the time it’s stuff meant to be inoffensive. Like ant soccer, the spelling bee, or computer passwords, the kind of ticky-tack odds and ends that fill an Andy Rooney segment or that clutter up the back pages of a small-town newspaper. And when Kemmick – or whoever – does address a civic issue, he pushes his opinion across as inoffensively as possible. “How to run a city, maybe.”

Ed, of course, is a fine writer, a good journalist by today’s standards, and a mensch. But I think we thirst for real insight. Real opinions, informed opinions. And meek, inoffensive reporting where “balance” is a keyword doesn’t satisfy. Papers should be dedicated to great ideas and truth-telling.

*climbs down from the soapbox*