BAD SCIENCE, EVEN WORSE RELIGION:
America's Tea
Party Fundamentalist – Christine O'Donnell
John H Williams
(Investigator 136, 2011
January)
In America, it
seems one can't do politics without an infusion of
religion. Barack Obama has shown that a president need not be white,
but despite his popularity, persuasive rhetoric and personal charm,
could he have made it as a non-believer? With the
mid-term
elections looming, he's re-affirming his religious convictions: not
only is he a Christian who believes in "the redemptive death and
resurrection of Jesus", he's a devout believer. No matter what
polls
may suggest, dismiss the notion that an atheist could ever become a
presidential contender!
Despite
his devoutness, post-Obamanian disillusionment has set in:
Mormons and Protestants are the most estranged, while among
conservative Christians government is increasingly viewed as a "force
of secularisation and of moral deregulation". Faith-based charities and
community organisations are being strongly supported by the White
House, but Obama's initiatives are being viewed askance by both
conservatives and liberals, and a portion of those who voted for him in
2008 have drifted to the Tea Party Movement, a new, "patriotically
extreme" middle-class section of the GOP (Grand Old Party), also known
as the Republican Party.
We're not
surprised when American politicians are creationists and
sometimes give chapter and verse on their biblical literalism. Christine
O'Donnell, who's become the Delaware Republican
candidate for
the Senate, is a young earth creationist and a Tea Party member.
She
has, since 2006, affirmed her "moral certitude" on abortion, chastity,
homosexuality ("pray away the gay") and prayer in schools. She felt as
if "God was calling her" to stand as a GOP candidate, primarily as an
anti-abortion campaigner.
O'Donnell
has rather extreme opinions, but admits that, "when you're
running for office, you have to water them down", and expedience is
more to the fore than is usual. She and her team are mindful of the
blaze of negative publicity from her media appearances, so her recently
‘re-cast' campaign has been more about the Constitution than the Bible.
Voters are now being asked to believe that her faith hasn't influenced
her politics: given her history, a tall order!
One might
think that, on her third run for office, O'Donnell
would have
a good grasp of the Constitution, but here's her response to "Do you
believe that evolution's a myth?"
"Local
school districts should decide, and should teach what they want
(on evolution and religion)." When informed that this was
unconstitutional, her plaintive response was, "So you're telling me
that the phrase, ‘separation of church and state' is found in
the First
Amendment?" Her ignorance of a law intrinsic to her advocacy of
inserting religion into schools is embarrassing, to say the least. The
First Amendment prohibits government from:
(a)
establishing a religion;
(b)
showing a
preference for one religion over another;
(c)
showing preference
to religion over non-religion.
Even more
embarrassing are her blithely ignorant opinions on evolution
and geology:
"Creationism
is believing that the world began as in Genesis: God
created the Earth in six 24 hour days, and there is just as much, if
not more, evidence supporting that."
"Dinosaur
fossils were planted either by God to test our faith, or by
Satan to sow seeds of doubt."
"Evolution
is a
theory, and is exactly that. There is not enough
consistent evidence to make it as a fact, it needs to consistently have
the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests
that they use to support evolution don't have consistent results. Too
many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact, but when you get
down to the hard evidence, it's merely theory."
"Regarding
fact,
they use carbon dating to prove something was millions
of years old, but we have the eruption of Mount St Helens, but the
carbon dating test that they used then would have to prove that these
were hundreds of millions of years younger, when what happened was they
had the exact same results on the fossils and canyons that they did the
tests on that were supposedly hundreds of millions of years old."
As a non-scientist, she
had the temerity to want to "square-off against
every legitimate scientist in the world", and in 1996 she debated
Professor McKinney of the University of Minnesota on CNN, and offered
the oxymoronic creation science quoted above, including the incoherent
rant about the age of Mt St Helens. If one googles "Mt St Helens age of
the Earth", one can understand why: almost every site of the first
three pages is taken up with an array of internet idiocy!
O'Donnell
is big on moral certitude, and she's been telling
people not
to masturbate (this requires lust, and the Bible says lust is wrong),
remain chaste until marriage (long wait if no marriage!), and "you are
either very good or evil", so, "to avoid doom", please be good for
heaven's sake. (She's since disavowed her stance on masturbation)
In 1996
she founded SALT (Savior's Alliance for Lifting the Truth),
lobbying Congress in opposing sex education, abortion and
homosexuality, viewed by her as a "sickness" and an "identity
disorder", adopted through "societal factors". SALT has been opposed by
a pro-gay/lesbian/transgender/bisexual group, Truth Wins Out, which has
exposed SALT's egregious philosophy and practices, based on the lie
that non-heterosexuals can be ‘converted' via counseling,
re-programming and prayer.
In her
youth she's admitted to dabbling in witchcraft, a belief
apparently held by 10% of Americans, though she ‘never inhaled' (joined
a coven). When challenged on this, her response was "Doesn't
everybody?" Even in America, a candidate with a former yen for
wiccanism is not good PR, and she's had to state that she's no longer
interested.
Her
academic CV, as per a Linkedln web profile, showed her to
be a
graduate of Farleigh-Dickenson University (F-D), a graduate of
Claremont Graduate University, and having studied Post- Modernism at
Oxford University. In fact, she did not graduate at F-D until
completing, at age 40, a required summer school course in 2010, then
receiving a degree in English Literature. She was sued by F-D in 1994
for the non-payment of her original course fees (US$4,823), and paid in
2003. Claremont Graduate University has no record of
her, but she'd taken classes at the less prestigious Claremont
Institute. Her Oxford ‘studies' comprised a week's training course with
the Phoenix Institute, which rented facilities at Oxford University!
In 2005
she implied that she was working towards a master's degree at
Princeton, but later admitted that she hadn't.
Her CV has
since been removed from the website, but revealed an
evangelical Christian who has, over a number of years,
ignored the 9th Commandment and been ‘economical with the truth'.
Yet she's
apparently heavily into truthfulness — note her
response to
Bill Maher's question on Politically Incorrect (15/9/10), "If
you were
in war-time Europe, giving shelter to a gay friend, and the Gestapo
came, would you tell the truth?"
"God would
find a way to do the right thing righteously. You never have
to practice deception."
Despite
the shallow, ‘righter than Right' weirdness of her (recently
diluted) opinions, Delawareans say things like "she's a nut-case but at
least she supports economic freedoms", and "I'd vote for her despite
her lunacy". O'Donnell's been exploiting the "marginalisation of
mainstream core conservatives by anti-American elites". "They call us
wacky, wing-nuts. We the People!" And, "I am you."
O'Donnell,
a barnstorming ‘mama grizzly', purveyor of pseudoscience and
a preacher of morality she hasn't always practiced, likely scared
moderate voters as being too wacky, and was a third time loser on
November 2nd. The result was a win to Chris Coons (58.5%), O'Donnell on
41.5 %.