Profiles in Stupidity: Don McLeroy

Recently, I wrote about the appointment of biblical creationist Don McLeroy as the head of the Texas Department of Education, despite the fact that he favors replacing the past few hundred years of geology, biology, cosmology, etc. with pseudo-scientific, overtly religious beliefs. Well, the man recently gave a speech at Grace Bible Church where he revealed his intentions of using "intelligent design" as a tool to start teaching public school children about biblical literalism.

The audio of the speech can be heard here: .

A transcript is available here.

A few choice quotes:

• "I am the only nonacademic in this group"
• "If you open a high school textbook, they basically state as a fact that we share common ancestry with life that first got started and some went to be plants and eventually trees and some became us. And that is what I mean by Darwinism."
• "Neo-Darwinism is another description term for just evolution, common descent that talks about genetic variability so it gets it more precise. And is that the target? It’s not supported by evidence, it’s not Biblical, so that must be the target of intelligent design, but really it’s not the main target either. Actually, in intelligent design we are focused on a on a bigger target, and in the words of Phillip Johnson 'the target is metaphysical naturalism, materialism or just plain old naturalism.' "
• "Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young earth, old earth, it’s all in the tent of intelligent design. And intelligent design here at Grace Bible Church actually is a smaller, uh, tent than you would have in the intelligent design movement as a whole. Because we are all Biblical literalists, we all believe the Bible to be inerrant"
• "naturalism has enslaved our society’s mind"
• "we’re really not sure about how much mind control stuff really works"
• "The analogy of evolution as the matrix, it’s, it’s really amazing that we do live, seems to me, in a matrix-type world. I mean, we have been programmed, our society has been programmed, in the way we look at things outside. It’s very interesting. But what do the Scriptures say?"
• "Remember keep chipping away at the objective empirical evidence."
  

Remember, Texas, this man will be in charge of the science education of your children.