PKeating001

Afera Kansas

God and Man in Oz

By Peter Keating Additional reporting by Susie Xu.
"George Magazine", October 2000

When Kansas tried to get evolution out of its
classrooms, it set off a battle that could change the
future of education and politics. Here's the inside
story of an election that ultimately threatens our
deepest personal beliefs.

The Kansas State Board of Education meets in a functional
and frugal room on the first floor of a gray building two blocks east of
the state's capitol in Topeka. The lighting is fluorescent, the lavender
carpet is drab, and members of the board sit around a long U-shaped
table, facing visitors on folding chairs. On July 11, 2000, a man
named Jack Krebs stood in front of the table to use the two minutes
allotted to any citizen who attends a board meeting and wants to speak his mind. Krebs identified
himself as a board member of the Kansas Citizens for Science,
then launched into an attack on a decision the board had made
11 months before. "The science standards you approved
deleted material that represents the consensus view of science
on evolution and inserted creationist literature," he said. Not
only are they bad science, Krebs said, "they are bad religion...
bad politic... and they are bad educationally."

To an outsider, Krebs's criticism seemed worthy of response,
but the board members barely blinked. They had heard it all
before and expected to hear it again. Inside the state education
system, supporters and opponents of evolution had been
talking past each other for months. Ultimately, the dispute
between the two sides would not be decided by the
bureaucracy, nor by science or religion, but by politics. The
election that would resolve it was already on - and tearing
apart the state.

Kansas is a place where bus drivers will take you directly to
your door if they can, where bakers sell dollar cookies for 25
cents because they're two days old, where newspaper
machines give change. A place where people take care of the
little details for one another. Forget the oddities of Dodge City
or Oz; over many generations, the heartland values of small
towns and the caprices of farm life have bred in Kansans an
instinct for extending a pragmatic helping hand to neighbors and
strangers alike. But listen to some of the people involved in
Kansas's public life.

"Their batteries get charged with negative acids," says
Lieutenant Governor Gary Sherrer. "They are angry, they think
the government is out to get them, and it is personal to them. I
would go to their houses and say hi, but they didn't talk to me.
They said, 'He's the demon.'"

"They want to go back to some time in the 1950s," says Sue
Gamble, a member of the Shawnee Mission Board of
Education. "They have a fear of funny-looking and
funny-sounding people, that we're going to lose our morals,
that our kids are going to turn away from us. My daughter says
I go too far, but I really think it's about paranoid fear."

"To them, I am the enemy," says Steve Appier, a biology
teacher at Shawnee Mission North High School. The reason:
He teaches evolution in his classroom and believes it is a
unifying concept in science.

"They" are Christian conservatives - organized fundamentalists
who have split the Kansas Republican party and upended the
state's politics. Their ranks are growing, and their fight for the
most basic value of all - the very existence of God - is
transforming local politics all over the U.S.

"Our children are asked to attend government schools that in
many cases resemble war zones - without the basic right to be
taught their true origin, or at least be given the option to decide
for themselves, evolution vs. creationism," says Joyce Moore,
executive director of the Kansas Christian Coalition. "The only
hope that America has is that godly men and women of
character will stand together as one mighty army and declare to
the immoral, impure, obscene, and foul: 'Your days of unlimited
access to the minds of our children in Kansas are over.'
The army of God has been silent for too long, and we are
taking this state back."

They made their most significant progress toward taking the state back
on August 11, 1999. That day, the Kansas school board voted by a margin
of six to four to adopt new standards, written by three of its own
members, for the teaching of science in the state's public schools. The
board set aside previous guidelines drafted by a committee of 27
educators, scientists, and citizens. Now, Kansas schools could delete
references to evolution as a process whereby organisms living today are descended from different
species in the past.

The decision set off a year of relentless publicity, criticism, and
political maneuvering that would culminate in the Republican
primary for the state school board on August 7, 2000. Five of
the board's 10 seats would be at stake, and three of them
belonged to conservative Republicans running for re-election. If
they won their primaries, they would be practically guaranteed
a November victory in their heavily Republican districts - and
they'd keep control of the board. If they lost, the new
standards would likely be overturned.

As the race heated up, a Kansan's stance on evolution came to
stand for a position on an entire constellation of personal and
political issues that separate Christian conservatives from
moderate Republicans. Among them: their attitudes toward
education, rationalism, the secular culture, the role of faith in the
public arena, and, not least, each other.

The Republican primary contest in the State Board of
Education's second district, covering eastern Johnson County
in the suburban northeastern part of Kansas, perfectly
epitomized the conflict. There, Linda Holloway, who chaired
the state board at the time of the science standards vote, drew
Sue Gamble, a 13-year veteran of the local Shawnee Mission
Board of Education, as her opponent. Petite and partial to
colorful jackets, the 50-year-old Holloway is a quiet but
polished speaker. She has bangs, arched brows, and heavy
eyelids; when she disapproves of something, the combination
forms a lethal squint. Holloway was raised a Southern Baptist
near Atlanta - she had a conversion experience at the age of
seven - and attends services at the nondenominational Grace
Christian Fellowship in southern Johnson County with her
husband, Jerry, a retired civil engineer. She spent 20 years,
mostly in the Kansas City public schools, teaching special
education to classes of students with severe mental and
physical disabilities. A conservative Republican, she first won
election to the Kansas State Board of Education in 1996, and
she chaired the board last year. "The other side had control of
the board for 30 years, and it was pretty hidden from the
public," Holloway said in her campaign. "When the
conservatives got in there, we kind of messed up their little
sandbox a bit."

Like Holloway, Gamble, 58, lives in Shawnee, is married, and
has adult children who attended public schools. Unlike
Holloway, who feels there is "not enough evidence to show
species-to-species" transitions, Gamble accepts both God and
evolution. "Darwin was a Christian, regardless of what the
religious right says," Gamble said during the race. "When I was
in high school in the '50s, I was taught evolution by a Jesuit
priest. Even then, I believed in both." The science vote finalized
her decision to run, said Gamble, a real estate agent and former
president of the Kansas Association of School Boards. "Our
standards are being weakened, and the education of our
children is being weakened over time."

The board's decision had made Kansas the butt of late-night
talk-show humor and the target of sophisticates' scorn. Critics,
from Kansas's own Governor Bill Graves to Salman Rushdie
to Bill Nye the Science Guy, lambasted the board. Comedians
quipped that Kansas had solved its Y2K problem by turning its
clocks back to Y1K. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote:
"A Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim, 'They still call
it Kansas, but I don't think we're in the real world anymore.'"

But the millennial crusade against evolution was no joke, and
the opponents of evolution aren't "turnips that just fell off the
truck," to use Holloway's phrase. Kansas was just the latest
battlefield in an ongoing series of fights waged by
anti-evolutionists, who since the mid '90s have triggered
curricular controversies in 14 states, ranging from New
Hampshire to California. With increasing sophistication, they
have targeted low-turnout and primary elections, and have
gained control of local school boards and political organizations
across the country.

It's happened before. Between 1901 and 1929, as millions of
Americans participated in a fundamentalist awakening, 37 state
legislatures considered and three states passed anti-evolution
bills. In 1925, high school teacher John Scopes went on trial
for violating Tennessee's ban. Three-time Democratic
presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan led the
prosecution; when his creationist views were exposed by
defense attorney Clarence Darrow, Bryan was humiliated in the
national press, though he won the case. The Supreme Court
invalidated the outright teaching of creationism in 1968.

Creationists struck again in the early 1980s, arguing that
schools should provide "balanced treatment" of evolution and
offer "scientific creationism" - creationism stripped of its
explicitly religious references. But the Supreme Court struck
down balanced-treatment laws, too.

Now a third wave of anti-evolutionism is sweeping school
districts across the U.S. This time, creationists are thinking that
if they cannot teach their views in place of or alongside
evolution, maybe they can simply eliminate evolution from local
schools. And anti-evolutionists have also found a home in the
national Republican party. Last year, for example, House Whip
Tom DeLay claimed that one reason for the massacre at
Columbine High School was that "our school systems teach the
children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are
evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud." George W.
Bush believes that "both creationism and evolution should be
taught as theories, but that ultimately it's up to the local school
districts," according to Bush campaign spokesman Ray
Sullivan.

The Gamble-Holloway campaign got rolling on April 9. That
afternoon, Holloway spoke at a "Super Sunday" gathering at
First Family Church, a Southern Baptist enclave. She shared a
podium with Duane Gish, a California biochemist and one of
the most famous advocates for "young earth" creationism, the
belief that the world is about 6,000 years old and that every
species was created separately by God. Holloway attacked
national science organizations such as the American
Association for the Advancement of Science for alleged ties to
eugenics. "That means master races," she said. "That fits very
well with the Darwinian thought."

Gish followed Holloway, saying: "When I read about what
happened in Kansas, I said, 'That gal is one of my heroes.'"

Three days later, Senator Sam Brownback from Topeka

endorsed Holloway. Brownback is a staunch conservative, but
even so, it was an extraordinary move: a U.S. senator
intervening in a contested state-level primary. "Linda's an
incumbent, and she's an old friend," Brownback said. "Local
decision making's a good approach to take."

Oryginal: http://www.georgemag.com/xp6/George/Features/1000/Kansas.xml

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