LEADING CANDIDATE FOR FLORIDA MAYOR THINKS EVOLUTION IS NAZI IDEA
[Not a correct headline.]
ST PETERSBURG TIMES - Darwin's theory of evolution helped fuel the
rise of Hitler and contributed to the school-shooting massacre at
Columbine, a former St. Petersburg City Council member wrote in a
letter urging the Pinellas County School Board to expose students to
alternative theories.
"Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection
and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are
superior over the weak," Bill Foster wrote board members in a letter
received this week. "This is a slippery slope."
He continued: "One of the Columbine shooters wrote on his Web site,
'You know what I love? Natural selection! It's the best thing that
ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak
organisms.'"
Foster, who recently stepped down after being term-limited from
office, is widely considered to be a leading contender to be St.
Petersburg's next mayor in 2009. He said Friday he wrote the letter,
which appears on his law firm's stationery, as the concerned parent
of a high school student. . .
Foster isn't the first Darwin critic to attempt to link evolutionary
theory to violence and racism, but he is the first public figure in
the Florida debate to do so.
After the Columbine shooting in 1999, then-U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay cited
Darwin's theory as a contributing factor, reading a letter into the
Congressional Record that said public schools "teach the children
that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out
of some primordial soup of mud." This summer, Fort Lauderdale's Coral
Ridge Ministries aired a TV special on Christian cable called
Darwin's Deadly Legacy. "To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler,"
said the group's late founder, D. James Kennedy.
Foster echoed those words in his letter: "Adolf Hitler duped an
entire generation using Darwin's evolution," he wrote. "He sought to
preserve the 'favored' race in the struggle for survival."
http://www.sptimes.com/2008/01/12/Southpinellas/
Foster_links_Darwin__.shtml
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The creationist ministry Answers in Genesis is especially known for
some of these claims[11][12]. [Hitler and Darwin] The most respected
academic who advocates such views is Richard Weikart, a historian at
California State University, Stanislaus and a fellow at the Discovery
Institute; the main organization trying to incorporate Intelligent
Design into science classrooms in the US and elsewhere.