By Jack Cashill

Courtesy of the Cashill Newsletter - August 13, 1999

It was a thrilling moment to be sure, maybe even an historic one.

There stood Loren Lutes, Co-Chair of the Kansas Science Education Standards Writing Committee. Before him sat the ten everyday folks on the Kansas State Board of Education. Around him stood a dozen camerman and an equal number of pretty, young infobabes.

Just like Spencer Tracy at the Scopes Trial, Lutes was going to hand these snakehandlers their hash. How dare they even consider rejecting the standards that his fellow “science educators” had labored over for months. How dare they threaten to excise macro-evolution from the document and return the issue of evolution to local control. Just who did these board people think they were trifling with?

Shaking with indignation, Lutes proceeded to read an endless list of educational big shots who stood firmly behind his draft, including all 27 members of his committee, the state’s school superintendents and university presidents and just about every dang science organization that has ever queued up for a government grant. His supporters in the crowd seemed confident that the board would wither before his righteous scorn.

They were wrong.

Just when we all had thought that the Supreme Court, the mainstream media, Hollywood, the National Education Association, the ACLU and sundry other progressive forces had made America safe for secular humanism, the board's six member majority found the courage to reject educators’ standards and insert its own.

Da noive!

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