Lawmakers Miss the Boat!

The recent passage of a resolution in the State of Louisiana (US) House of Representatives earned more notoriety for what it left out than for what it actually said.

Rep. Sharon Broome’s original draft of House Concurrent Resolution 74, which passed the House Education Committee on a 9-5 vote, condemned the racist ideology of Darwinian evolution, that certain “races” of humans have “evolved” to a higher level than others.1 Yet the version of the resolution that was passed by the entire House (May 8, 2001) had all references to Charles Darwin and Darwinism removed by amendment (which passed 65-28). The final version did nothing more than condemn racism in general.2

As honorable as a general condemnation of racism appears to be, the lawmakers who amended the resolution revealed their own ideological biases. Rather than admit the undeniable historical facts that Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, and other evolutionists used Darwinian teaching to promote their racist philosophies, which in turn directly influenced the thinking of Adolph Hitler, the legislators admitted their own bias for the religion of evolutionism.

Even the secular media picked up on this irony. A local editorialist observed:

“Our legislators missed the boat and took all references to Darwinism out of the resolution, making it simply a resolution against racism.

“Either they didn’t want to face the facts Broome sought to bring to their knowledge, or they were so prejudiced against the only alternative teaching to evolution (creationism) that while passing a bill [sic] denouncing racial prejudice, they were demonstrating their own religious prejudice.” ³

This very prejudice against addressing the many problems with Darwinian teaching led to other typical evolutionist tactics: ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments. These tactics also caught the notice of the editorialist:

“The resolution was labeled as a ploy of the religious right to take the teaching of evolution out of schools.

“The reason for their mudslinging is clear—when you can’t argue with the facts, sling enough mud to cover up the facts.” 3

Furthermore, one of the evolutionist professors who opposed the resolution, Joseph Graves, Jr of Arizona State University (US), deflected the attack away from Darwin’s blatantly racist book The Descent of Man by merely asserting he’d “found nothing racist in Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species.” 4 In setting up this straw man argument (that the claims of the inherent racism in Darwinian theory were based solely on Origin of Species), Graves deflected the attention away from the more substantial evidence from Darwin’s other writings. These tactics (along with others) proved successful enough to sway the legislators into amending the resolution to nothing more than a watered-down condemnation of racism.

While on the one hand it can be frustrating to see the apparent success of the evolutionists” tactics in confusing the issues, it is encouraging on the other hand to note that even the secular media is beginning to recognize the prejudice and disingenuous tactics of the mainstream evolutionary community. We can only hope that the secular media and the public continue to become aware of these biases and tactics, so that more people will be led away from the religion of evolutionism and back to the authority of the Word of God, the Bible.