Sometimes, you read or hear something that makes you say, "no way, that can't actually be true, nobody in their right mind would think like that!" Well, today we have a perfect example of that, with the case of one Frosty E. Hardiman - suburban father of seven and "an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is 'one of the signs' of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day." No, this isn't a bad joke. And yes, his name really is "Frosty."
Believe it or not, this "Frosty" guy actually managed to stop his daughter's school from showing Al Gore's powerful movie on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth" (which, by the way, every American should see). As if that's not bad enough, this person's tirade actually led to the school's pusillanimous principal informing the science teacher in question that "she would receive a disciplinary letter for not following school board rules that require her to seek written permission to present 'controversial' materials in class." Finally, the town's schoolboard caved to extreme right-wing "political correctness" by "impos[ing] a ban on screenings of the film for the district's 22,500 students."
Sadly, this is not a joke. Even though "[t]he National Academy of Sciences, together with nearly all of the world's leading climate experts, have agreed that there is conclusive evidence that human activity is causing the Earth to warm and that there is an urgent need to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the air," apparently all it takes is one wacky guy with a far-right-wing political agenda to throw everyone for a loop in suburban America, circa 2007. What does this incident say about our culture, our politics, and our level of scientific literacy? Well, apparently the public has weighed in with its opinion:
Members of the school board say they have been bombarded by thousands of e-mails and phone calls, many of them hurtful and obscene, accusing them of scientific ignorance, pandering to religion and imposing prior restraint on free speech.
Scientific igorance? Check. Pandering to (one person's version of fundamentalist) religion? Check. Imposing restraints on free speech? Check.
Have we missed anything here? Oh yeah, there's the crazy, cockamamie "compromise" solution to this problem, in which "balance" will henceforth be required in the fine town of Federal Way when presenting the science of global warming to impressionable students in danger of - gasp! - leanring science in our public schools. Only one problem: on this issue, there isn't any "balance;" as the science teacher said, "The only thing I have found so far [to provide balance on this issue] is an article in Newsweek called 'The Cooling World,'" and that was written 37 years ago.
Meanwhile, several angry residents inquired before an "emotional" school board meeting whether or not there "should be a 'balanced' presentation of the Nazi Holocaust, because there are many who deny that it occurred." Hey, why not? If the right wing nutjobs are going to insist on "balance" with regard to global warming, evolution, and other science that has been proven to a 99.99999% degree of probability, we might as well start providing "balance" on other issues as well. Next science class lesson in Federal Way: guest lecture on "why the world may NOT be round after all!"
If he wants to live a flat-earth sort of life, that's fine. But please let the rest of us live in the real world. On the positive side, the kids did learn a real lesson - that if you're enough of a jackass you can have your way with a wussy school board.