The GOP's Frightening Alternate Universe

There are times I cannot even fathom what the world view if you will of members of today's Republican Party base must look like.  It certainly bears no resemblance to objective reality - especially for the knuckle dragging Bible is inerrant crowd.  Heavens forbid that archeology has disproved many of the narratives in the Bible, not to mention that the human genome studies have shown that Adam and Eve never existed as historical individuals.  The sad truth is that one cannot contend with the world and make truly moral decisions when one is rejecting objective fact and proudly embracing ignorance.  Yet that is exactly what we see time and time again across the GOP base and among politicians who pander to them rather than demand that they confront reality.  A case in point is Florida Senator Marco Rubio who as noted in an previous post refused to reject the "young earth" claims of creationists, thereby proving himself immediately incompetent to hold any high office including the presidency.  Paul Krugman has a scathing column in the New York Times that looks at why politicians like Rubio need to be called out and kicked to the curb.  Here are highlights: 

Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”  

It’s funny stuff, and conservatives would like us to forget about it as soon as possible. Hey, they say, he was just pandering to likely voters in the 2016 Republican primaries — a claim that for some reason is supposed to comfort us. 

But we shouldn’t let go that easily. Reading Mr. Rubio’s interview is like driving through a deeply eroded canyon; all at once, you can clearly see what lies below the superficial landscape. Like striated rock beds that speak of deep time, his inability to acknowledge scientific evidence speaks of the anti-rational mind-set that has taken over his political party. 

By the way, that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education.

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence. 

The most obvious example other than evolution is man-made climate change. As the evidence for a warming planet becomes ever stronger — and ever scarier — the G.O.P. has buried deeper into denial, into assertions that the whole thing is a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists. And this denial has been accompanied by frantic efforts to silence and punish anyone reporting the inconvenient facts.

What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs. Today’s Republicans cocoon themselves in an alternate reality defined by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page  .  .  .  .

Coming back to the age of the earth: Does it matter? No, says Mr. Rubio  .  .  .  .  But he couldn’t be more wrong. 

We are, after all, living in an era when science plays a crucial economic role. How are we going to search effectively for natural resources if schools trying to teach modern geology must give equal time to claims that the world is only 6.000 years old? How are we going to stay competitive in biotechnology if biology classes avoid any material that might offend creationists?

 So don’t shrug off Mr. Rubio’s awkward moment. His inability to deal with geological evidence was symptomatic of a much broader problem — one that may, in the end, set America on a path of inexorable decline.

 Krugman is 100% on the mark.  I continue to believe that conservative Christianity is a severe threat to America's future both in terms of religious freedom for other citizens and in terms of the dumbing down of education so as to not offend the sensibilities of the ignorance embracing morons.   Sometimes I think being gay gives one an advantage in analyzing the world and events around us - we've had to learn that so much of what we were told growing up simply isn't true and many of us have embraced scientific knowledge that confirms what we already knew: we were born gay and that the rot in the Bible that purports to condemn us is nothing by antiquated, ignorant bullshit that belongs in the dust bin of history.  One has to wonder when the Republican Party is going to figure this out.