Foot Shooting Season Begins Anew In Kansas

by Jack Cashill

When the four of us got together that rainy September 18 morning at the IHOP in Shawnee, we expected that Kansas foot-shooting season would soon kick in to high gear.

We just had no idea how soon or how publicly or how high.

At the table with me were the two founders of a group called the Intel-ligent Design (ID) Net-work and a Kansas state legislator who had been influential in passing the state's new bioscience legislation. Names aren't all that important here, but the two ID guys were not the kind of moon-barkers you might expect if you had read Thomas Frank's recent best-seller about Kansas politics. One is a just retired Lathrop & Gage attorney. The other is a professor of medicine at UMKC. The legislator is a good, open-minded guy but not an ID adherent.

I more or less called the meeting to minimize the impending carnage. With one foot in either camp--economic development and intelligent design--I had a keen interest in limiting the mayhem. If things went truly awry, I could end up with two bloody stumps before the foot-shooting season expired.

A little background. About ten years ago, I was hosting a radio program on KMBZ. One caller kept insisting that we talk about evolution, and I kept turning him down. "Why don't we just argue about whether the earth is flat," I rejoined among other nuggets of comparable wit.

I knew better. I had gotten a PhD in American studies with an emphasis in intellectual history. I had studied Darwinism at a Big Ten university, the main campus no less, the one with the football team and real professors who smoked pipes, seduced coeds, and drove Volvos before anyone outside of Sweden had even heard of them. After graduating, I had become something of an armchair paleontologist with a special interest in American origins. I had presumed I could pound the caller into submission with my properly agnostic credentials.

I was wrong. Like one of those pop-up gophers, he persisted. One day, finally, he showed up at the studio and gave me a book on the subject. I thanked him and promptly ditched it in the trunk of my car somewhere between the spare tire and the old lawn mower I kept meaning to get repaired.

Then fate intervened. Or maybe--God forbid!--Providence. I took my daughters to the Renaissance Festival. They were savvy enough to not want to be seen with their old man, which was fine by me. I was pleased to sit in the shade for a few hours, drink a beer or two, ogle the chubby girls Cinderella-ized by their 13th century, push-up bustiers, and, of course, read a book.

Good God, I forgot to bring a book! I rummaged desperately through the car and finally the trunk, and there I found an old, grease-covered text called Darwin on Trial by a UC Berkeley professor named Philip Johnson. I figured it was this book or the Festival pro-gram, so I grudgingly read the book.

It just so happened that in the next issue of an intellectual Jewish magazine that I subscribed to, Commentary, there was also an article challenging Darwinism. This kind of shocked me as I had thought only Christian wing nuts doubted Darwin. Intrigued, I read a good deal more, and the more I read the more convinced I became that Darwinism was a 19th century house of cards, one that, if challenged, would topple like Marxism and Freudianism before it.

For the next several years, I remained fully closeted in my skepticism. It was not until the now notorious 1999 Kansas School Board hearings that I worked up the courage to come out on radio and, to my delight, I discovered there were other reasonably sane people quite like me. I quickly learned, however, that the local media and the science establishment were not keen on celebrating our diversity. Au contraire. In fact, wittingly or otherwise, they had invited the world media to have a good laugh at our expense. Yuk! Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!

Given my relationship with Ingram's , I could see something that few others could: this laugh-fest was hitting Kansas in the pocketbook. One representative of the Kansas tech community told me he was in Brussels trying to sell NATO on the state's tech capabilities when the evolution stories hit. To say the least, the worldwide guffaws did not help him close the deal.

Embarrassed by the attention, the state's power-brokers managed to hasten the exit of a couple of the more vulnerable school board members. But enough citizens cared about the issue to vote a couple more like-minded board members back in. In fact, when polled, roughly 88% of Kansans reject the Darwinist paradigm, and not all of them can be shamed out of voting their beliefs. Now, the anti-Darwinists have the majority once more. And again, they are prepared to challenge the Darwinian monopoly in Kansas public education.

Thus, the meeting at IHOP. I proposed two cooperative scenarios. In one, university presidents, public officials and other responsible parties--those who understand the stakes--encourage the profs and teachers to treat the dissenting citizens with respect. Working together, all parties would then try to position Kansas as a state where even lay people care about science and where vigorous debate is welcomed, even encouraged.

What was I smoking when I dreamed that one up?

In a second, more likely scenario, I proposed that the responsible parties encourage their teachers not to run off to the media crying that the Yahoos have taken over the state once more.

Unfortunately, the teachers had their own plan--in it, they run off to the media crying that the Yahoos have taken over the state once more. And while we were busy eating pancakes, they were busy doing just that. Six days after the IHOP summit, the Kansas City Star played its own silly part in this burlesque, running a comically predictable editorial, "Humiliation looms again in Kansas."

An Oskaloosa high school teacher named Jack Krebs had gotten to The Star's editorialists, and now together, they were screaming to the high heavens that Kansas had better avoid the bad publicity of 1999. "Kansas science classes should not get sidetracked into issues that belong in religious education," thundered The Star editorial, fully misunderstanding the issue.

As a side note, when I first turned against Darwinism, I had not been to church ten times in the previous twenty years, and knew only the Bible verses I had learned watching Pulp Fiction. This wasn't about religion. It was about the perpetuation of bad science. But it was apparent that The Star editorial writers knew little about either.

A few nights later, Krebs and the KU administration invited in the media for a pro-Darwin rally before nearly 500 enthusiasts at Kansas University. It was called a "civil debate," but curiously, only Krebs was allowed to speak. From what I read in the paper and saw on TV, Krebs argued that bad publicity could hurt the Kansas bioscience efforts.

Now maybe if he can only get 60 Minutes to listen!

Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 25 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.