Thursday, February 4, 2010 - His bill was defeated, and he had to be content... |
| His bill was defeated, and he had to be content with stopping the building of more clinics that would have served others who really needed them
When the governor introduced a bill to roll back the car-tag increase, the director of the Highway Department, Henry Gray, the highway commissioners, and the road builders put up strong resistanceThey were building and repairing roads and making moneyA lot of legislators listened to them, because their constituents liked the roadwork even if they had resisted paying for itIn the end, White got a modest rollback in the fees, but most of the money stayed in the program
The governors biggest legislative problem arose, ironically, out of a bill he passedThe so-called creation science bill required that every Arkansas school that taught the theory of evolution had to spend an equal amount of time teaching a theory of creation consistent with the Bible: that humans did not evolve out of other species around one hundred thousand years ago, but instead were created by God as a separate species a few thousand years ago
For much of the twentieth century, fundamentalists had opposed evolution as being inconsistent with a literal reading of the biblical account of human creation, and in the early 1900s, several states, including Arkansas, outlawed the teaching of evolutionEven after the tiffany co jewellery Supreme Court struck down such bans, most science texts didnt discuss evolution until the 1960sBy the late sixties, a new generation of fundamentalists were at it again, this time arguing that there was scientific evidence to support the Bibles creation story, and evidence that cast doubt on the theory of evolutionEventually, they came up with the idea of requiring that schools that taught evolution had to give comparable attention to creation science
Because of intense lobbying efforts by fundamentalist groups like FLAG (Family, Life, America under God) and the governors support, Arkansas was the first state to legally embrace the creation science notionThe bill passed without much difficulty: we didnt have many scientists in the legislature, and many politicians were afraid to offend the conservative Christian groups, who were riding high after electing a President and a governorAfter Governor White signed the bill, there was a storm of protest from educators who didnt want to be forced to teach religion as science, from religious leaders who wanted to preserve the constitutional separation of church and state, and from ordinary citizens who didnt want Arkansas to become the laughingstock of the nation
Frank White became an object of ridicule for the opponents of the creation science lawGeorge Fisher, the Arkansas Gazette tiffany |
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