Culture Clips — August 10, 2006

What’s the Matter with Kansas?

State school-board elections don’t normally receive much national media attention. Yet the school-board primary race in Kansas on Tuesday, representing a key front in the Darwin wars, was an exception.

Will Darwinism be taught as unquestionable dogma? That’s the question that voters decided. In Kansas, it seems it will.

Kansas has been one of five states with biology curricula that include instruction about the evidence both for and against neo-Darwinism, requiring that students learn about the “critical analysis” of evolutionary theory. Darwin advocates worked hard to defeat the majority on the education board and eliminate this requirement. On Tuesday they succeeded in this first objective, and the second will follow in due course.

The current “controversial” Kansas Science Standards very clearly do not mandate that students learn about intelligent design. On the contrary, as the board explained, “We also emphasize that the Science Curriculum Standards do not include Intelligent Design.”

Can’t get much clearer than, can you? Yet an outfit called Kansas Citizens for Science argued exactly the reverse — that the Kansas Science Standards do indeed mandate instruction about ID. It ended up convincing the voters. Or rather, deceiving them.

David Klinghoffer
National Review Online

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=
OTA1Y2IzMTk1MDYzNzI5MGFhZmJjOWE3MWM0Y2ZkOGI=

Little Boy Lost

We have become so accustomed to terrible things happening to kids that we tend to forget that we didn’t always live in such fear. Until recently, we didn’t have child-sex tourism, child prostitution, and pedophiles soliciting our kids online. A few years ago, we would not have accepted a television show like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which regularly chronicles, for our viewing pleasure, stories about the torture, rape, and murder of America’s children.

The Adam Walsh law — which the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children calls “the toughest and most important piece of legislation in the past 25 years in helping to save children’s lives,” goes on the offensive against child predators by expanding the national sex offender registry — integrating the information in state registries to make it harder for pedophiles to avoid detection by moving to another state. It imposes tough mandatory minimums for those who commit serious crimes against children and increases penalties for sex traffickers and those who force children into prostitution. The law also provides money to train law enforcement in combating Internet crimes against children.

This law is a huge leap forward. But unfortunately, it only goes after predators after they have victimized a child. We also need to go after the people who inspire these crimes: pornographers.

According to the National Coalition Against Pornography, no single characteristic of pedophilia is more pervasive than the obsession with child pornography. The vast majority of child molesters admit to the regular use of hard-core porn, and one study found that states with the highest consumption of pornography also have the highest rape rates. “Not everyone who reads porn acts out [against children], but everyone who acts out does read child pornography,” Roben Rodriguez of the International Center for Mission and Exploited Children told USA Today.

Porn is a $10-billion-a-year industry, much of it related to organized crime. Some 800 million adult videos and DVDs are rented every month — many to people who live near our homes.

Why do we put up with this? Why do we put up with porn on the candy aisle of the grocery store, Internet portals that allow child-porn clubs on their websites, and cable contracts that force us to subscribe to sleaze if we want Sesame Street?

You'd think parents, with Adam Walsh and our own children in mind, would do everything they could to rid the world of the child porn that drives pedophiles to commit crimes against children. Last week's bill-signing is a sobering reminder of how many victims are out there — and, tragically, how many more victims there are to come.

Anne Morse
National Review Online

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=
NzczZTJjN2MzODVjOGNkZDdiOTBjYjFiZWQwNGVhZTM=

Jews Shot in Seattle, but Left Angry at Mel Gibson

On July 28, 2006, a Muslim entered the building of the Seattle Jewish Federation and shot every Jew he saw, murdering one woman and wounding five others.

On the same day, Mel Gibson was arrested on DUI charges and while intoxicated let loose with anti-Semitic invective at the Jewish police officer who arrested him.

Question: Which story has most troubled the Left?

The answer is known to any American who can hear or read.

So, the real question is: Why? Why has the shooting and murder of Jews elicited less angst from the Left than the anti-Semitic statements made by Mel Gibson when drunk?

The answers are very troubling. As Time magazine said about global warming (but never about Islamic terror), "Be worried, very worried."

… The antipathy toward Christian fundamentalists and conservatives is why Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic statements trouble the Left more than Naveed Haq and the genocidal anti-Semitism permeating the Muslim world. And what is it about those Christians that most disturbs the Left? That they talk in terms of good and evil and believe the former must fight the latter, precisely the area of the Left's greatest weakness.

Dennis Prager
Townhall

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager
/2006/08/08/jews_shot_in_seattle,_left_angry_at_mel_gibson