Blue Collar Scientist

Could it be that if:

…you live in a county where a sheriff’s deputy is too ignorant to understand that a quadriplegic is unable to stand up….

…that if you live in a county where the sheriff’s deputy responds to this limitation by tipping the man’s wheelchair forward and dumping him onto the police station floor….

…if you live in a county where three other sheriff’s deputies apparently helped out with this shocking and inhuman activity, apparently without finding it an especially wrong thing to do….

that perhaps, just perhaps, you get this quality of police work because the schools are free to teach Intelligent Design Creationism instead of science? That your police are like this because Intelligent Design Creationists were invited over and over again into their schools to spew their propaganda to honors students when those students should be learning about the way the universe really is? Could it be the sheriff’s department has to hire people like this because supposedly smart people on the school board are against science-based curriculum standards? Maybe you get this kind of thing in places where science fair participation is considered something students are “too busy” for?

Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch. But the unifying theme here is a case of the stupid. And I tend to think that a culture that has found a way to be stupid in one thing will find ways to be stupid in other things. Maybe the sheriff’s deputy should have been in anatomy class in high school, learning about the nature and effects of paralysis, instead of learning that god, or green space aliens, created all life on Earth? Or maybe not. Its very puzzling - what causes a person to do such a thing as dumping a paralyzed person out of their wheelchair onto a hard floor?

What I do know is that the intelligent design creationists repeatedly talk about how awful evolutionists are, how they have no morals, and so forth. But it isn’t in atheist strongholds in Europe that you hear about police dumping paralyzed people out of wheelchairs. It’s in places where extremist Christians have a stranglehold on the schools.

I don’t really think bad science education results in behavior like this. I just think good education matters.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 2:34 pm and is filed under dimwits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.