LEADING CANDIDATE FOR FLORIDA MAYOR THINKS EVOLUTION IS NAZI IDEA
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."
In his letter, Foster said he learned about Darwin in a class at
Northeast High School, where a teacher told him, "There is really no
scientific evidence to support this theory, but if you want to
believe that you descended from monkeys, then feel free to do so."
Becky Steele, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of
Florida, called those statements embarrassing.
bc the article confirms we are a polarized society.
p.s. this is interesting:
Mr. Romney said he was asked about his belief in evolution when he
was interviewed by faculty members for highest honors designations
before his graduation from Brigham Young University.
He told his interviewers that he did not believe there was a
“conflict between true science and true religion,” he said.
“True science and true religion are on exactly the same page,” he
said. “they may come from different angles, but they reach the same
conclusion. I’ve never found a conflict between the science of
evolution and the belief that God created the universe. He uses
scientific tools to do his work.”
The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints has no definitive
position on evolution, and church leaders have disagreed on the issue
over the years.
Mr. Romney said his answer was satisfactory to faculty members. “They
teach evolution at B.Y.U.,” he said.