Coulter crap: Don’t ignore it, expose it

>Archive - PWW Print Edition Archive - 2006 Editions - Aug. 5, 2006


 

BOOK REVIEW
Godless: The Church of Liberalism
By Ann Coulter
Crown Forum
2006, Hardcover, 320 pages

Why would Ann Coulter dedicate the last one-third of her latest book to attacking science? More specifically, why would this right-wing ideologue focus on bashing evolution?

“Godless” is a good preview of what candidates with a peace, health, environmental and women’s rights focus will face in the fall elections. If a candidate supports the teaching of evolution in science classes and opposes teaching intelligent design or opposes teaching both, they will be charged with the godless label. The fact that a Republican judge ruled in December 2005 against teaching intelligent design, as it was just another facade to introduce religion into public schools, meant nothing to Coulter and her ilk. Why? The Bushites know winning on the issues will be difficult so they are putting their focus on emotion.

Eighty-three percent of the people in the U.S. hold religious views with 45 percent adhering to biblical creationism. This is one of the reasons intelligent design — the idea that cells and molecules are too complex to have naturally evolved — got a foothold here and not in other parts of the world.

While Coulter promotes intelligent design, she crudely resurrects the lie that there is no proof of evolution in the fossil record. She claims there are no fossils showing one species changing into another species. It is as if scientists now have to find what would be tantamount to a fossilized digital movie revealing one species morphing into another species. This is the old creationist trick of putting forward an un-testable idea and saying, “Show me.”

Why would backward thinking ideologues invest this much ink in what might be labeled an academic exercise? Because they know if they can confuse people around causes and effects and not connecting the dots, they can focus them away from the real issues of the election campaigns, e.g. war, immigration and health care, and rile people up emotionally to vote against their real interests.

Thus once led on an anti-science path, people can be led to ignore the data around climate change and see Katrina-like storms as acts of the supernatural. They can be led to oppose the science around stem cell research and abortion.

Arguments around whether Coulter really believes this anti-evolution, anti-science nonsense are immaterial. This Cornell and University of Michigan graduate knows she can serve her class by dividing believers and nonbelievers. Congressman Rangel (D-N.Y.) calls her a cartoon character. That may be. The point is her book is being widely promoted. I had to get on a wait list from a library to read it. Don’t ignore it. Expose it.