The Weekly Standard, July 31, 2000, ARTICLES; Pg. 16

HEADLINE: The Natural Selection Election;
Will Charles Darwin survive the GOP primaries in Kansas?

BYLINE: BY JACK CASHILL;
Jack Cashill, a Kansas City based writer and producer, has just published
his first novel.

BODY:
Kansas City, Kansas

    AS SIXTY-THIRD STREET crosses the state line from Kansas City,
Missouri, into Kansas, the speed limit drops from 35 to 25, stop signs pop
up at every other corner, and police cars lurk behind the topiary.
Welcome
to Johnson County, one of the most affluent suburban areas in America and
the unlikely site for what a local columnist has aptly called "the
Gettysburg of the culture war." In this war, as in most, propaganda has
trumped truth at almost every turn.

    In Mission Hills, the first and plushest town across the state line,
where until recently "For Sale" signs were banned, "Sue Gamble" yard signs
sprout like wildflowers.  The heretofore anonymous 58-year-old is
challenging the incumbent in the GOP primary on August 1 for an unsalaried
seat on the Kansas State Board of Education.  Despite her brief window of
celebrity, Gamble has managed to attract the outspoken support of the
local
Republican establishment, the endorsement of the Kansas City Star, and the
eager embrace of the rich and the scared.

    As Sixty-Third Street quits Mission Hills and heads into the merely
prosperous suburbs to the west, the green Gamble signs yield to the red
signs of the incumbent Kansas school board member, Linda
Holloway.  Holloway runs strong in these more modest quarters, but
possibly
not strong enough.

    As "chairman" (her word) of the state school board last August,
Holloway committed the one unforgivable sin in the tonier confines of
Johnson County: She embarrassed her betters by reminding them that they
still live in Kansas.

    Specifically, Holloway led a surprise counterattack against the
science
educators who had attempted to impose new, evolution-heavy science
standards on the state.  The board's move was hardly the "ban on
evolution"
that was reported.  After much wrangling, Holloway's 6-4 majority merely
referred the decision on how evolution should be taught to local districts
and deleted a few contested theories from the state assessment tests, most
provocatively the so-called big bang.  "The decision," Holloway notes
correctly, "was rather minor compared to the reaction it got."
    That reaction bordered on the hysterical.  Governor Bill Graves, a
moderate Republican, called the move "a terrible, tragic, embarrassing
solution to a problem that did not have to exist," a lament that has been
echoed by one pol and pundit after another.  Kansas is the "laughingstock
of the world," wails the influential, if solipsistic, Mainstream Coalition
on its website.  A billboard on I-35, as it approaches Johnson County,
features a call to vote under one large word: "Embarrassed?"

    So deep is the embarrassment that Greg Musil -- one of three
contenders
in the GOP primary for Congress -- has chosen to exploit it and make
evolution the theme of his campaign.  His radio ads, for instance, quote
an
outrageous string of Kansas-bashing editorials from the East Coast media
and then, incredibly, present Musil as the only candidate bold enough to
confront the board of education and erase the shame.

    This strategy might seem just eccentric and amusing were the normally
Republican seat not held by a Democrat, one-term incumbent Dennis
Moore.  Worse, Musil has raised as much money as his two conservative
primary opponents combined, although both of them have better credentials
and more hair than the amorphously moderate Musil.

    To win their respective primaries and rout the Neanderthals, Musil and
fellow moderate Sue Gamble are both counting on the emergence of one-day
Republicans. Friends of their campaigns are openly targeting Democrats and
Independents and teaching them how to vote Republican on August 1.  This
corrosive strategy is endorsed by the Star's lead Johnson County
columnist,
Mike Hendricks, who encourages the reader to "become an instant
Republican"
and tells him how to do so.

    But in the same column, Hendricks gives away the game.  In an oddly
indiscreet moment, he discourages his readers from educating themselves on
the issues and urges them instead to just go vote.

    After all, why bother with education?  The election's not about
science. It's about self-image, a shaky thing around here at least since
Toto and Dorothy.  To be sure, neither Gamble nor Musil ever talks about
science.  A ballroomful of their highly respectable campaign contributors
will not have read more than three books among them on either side of the
unsettled evolution debate.  For all they know or care, the "Cambrian
explosion" could be a new French cheese dip.

    Holloway supporters, on the other hand, read voraciously and care a
lot.  In the last decade, the university-based "intelligent design"
movement -- whose proponents, in physics and biochemistry and philosophy
departments, admit the possibility of a designer in the intricate patterns
of nature -- has given grass-roots creationism an intellectual shot in the
arm.  Although the two movements differ deeply in their approach to
evidence, they share a keen knowledge of Darwinism and the holes
therein.  These holes are large and growing larger.  Some in the
intelligent design movement believe Darwinism may be on the verge of
collapse.

    It won't happen overnight.  The science establishment and its friends
in the media know they can evoke the Scopes paradigm and scare the elite
with the bogeyman of Christian fundamentalism.  But Holloway does not
stereotype easily. This artlessly handsome former inner-city school
teacher
-- perhaps the only woman in recent Johnson County history to let her hair
go gray -- begins her TV ads with the defiant line, "I want evolution to
be
taught in the schools."

    Like 68 percent of Americans (George W. Bush included) in a recent
Gallup poll, Holloway would like to see the schools teach the controversy:
She wants evolution and design theories taught side by side.  The
self-declared "progressive" camp won't hear of it.  As Robert Boston of
Americans United for Separation of Church and State pontificated during a
recent visit, "A choice between truth and error is not a choice worth
having."

    As is evident here on the ground, the Scopes paradigm has shifted in
Kansas. In their desperation to prop up Darwinism and shut intelligent
design out of the classroom, in their blind submission to the authority of
the science establishment and their willingness to sic the ACLU on those
who would challenge it, local progressives and their influential friends
have finally become what they long have ridiculed -- the Tennessee
legislature.

GRAPHIC: Picture, Kansas Board of Education chairman Linda Holloway meets
the press.  AP / Wide World