I have known several people who made a practice of deceiving others without telling any “lies.” Their method-of-choice invariably involved selective truth-telling. Such persons would respond to the question” Where’s Mary?” with, “She’s not here,” thus leaving the interrogator with the impression that Mary’s whereabouts were unknown, when in fact they knew exactly where Mary was. These same people would all vigorously object to being called liars. They followed the letter of the law, while breaking the spirit.
Neoconservatives seem intent on destroying of the Bill of Rights using the same methods. The state school board in Kansas supplied a prime example this week when they approved a measure allowing science teachers in Kansas schools to teach “intelligent design theory,” as an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Intelligent design theory posits that the world as we know it is too complex to have come about through evolution, and therefore reflects the existence of a divine being or higher intelligence.
The intelligent design camp pushes a thinly veiled agenda in offering this explanation in place of a theory that works just as well with a higher intelligence motivating it as it does without one. It never seems to cross our friends’ minds that it is certainly possible that the higher intelligence they are so desperate to prove could have caused evolution.
Perhaps the Neocons find this explanation of the origin of life on our earth unacceptable because they did not imagine it; it is more likely, however, that this explanation is unacceptable because the definition of “God” is left to the individual.
No Neocon would ever admit to attempting to establish a state religion, much less to dismantling the Bill of Rights. Nevertheless, conciliatory words notwithstanding, this is the very thing they are doing. It is not difficult to see why individual freedoms are so threatening to them. After all, who would choose to be without a choice?
Ironically, one of the chief tenets of evangelical Christianity (to which most Neocons subscribe) is that their Creator endowed human beings with free will. Not so ironically, the first sin consisted of humans serving their own wills rather than God’s.
© 2005
Ann Weaver Hart
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