Stephen Black wrote:
> The Arkansas legislation was approved by the House Committee on
> State Agencies and Governmental Affairs.
> It would bar the topic of evolution or related radiocarbon
> dating of animal and plant fossils from state-funded textbooks
> used in schools, museums, libraries and zoos.
The NYTimes recently covered a "political correctness controversy"
at US college campuses. A conservative activist named David Horowitz tried
to buy ad space in student newspapers at a number of campuses in order to
run an ad arguing against "reparations" for slavery. Of course, the ad
wasn't as much an argument as it was an attempt to generate fodder for
conservative complaints against "PC" practices (for example, the ad
apparently said that blacks should be _thankful_ to whites for "freeing
them"...). Nonetheless, the response at campuses did reflect a PC problem,
with activists on some campuses destroying masses of newspapers that dared
to print the ad, and demanding editors' resignations. A letter to the editor
of the Times today by Syracuse sophomore Jason Tanenbaum reads in part
"A response by a true thinker would be to provide a better and stronger
counterargument. It is true that the students meant well by disputing a
position that I and presumably many people are against, but censoring a
message or idea should not be the act of Ivy League students but that of
people who are too closed-minded to prove it wrong".
At the same time, conservative legislators in Arkansas (and Kansas)
seem completely untroubled by the PC-ness of their attempts to censor the
teaching of evolution. That Arkansas bill is one of the most chilling things
I've seen in quite a while.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
