Blue Collar Scientist

Back at the end of last month, I posted briefly on victims of creationist persecution, suggesting that I might work on finding sources and additional details for some of the cases I posted about.

Well, I never did, because I’m lazy, and because I’m approaching the deadline of a major software development and deployment project, accompanied by a trip to astronomical observatories, at the end of April - there has simply been no time. However, prominent Boston-area skeptic Blake Stacey took up the task, and has done yeoman work completing it.

So please head on over to Science after Sunclipse for the full story of ten people who have been harassed, threatened, assaulted fired, or killed by creationists who were upset that they were teaching or promoting evolutionary theory.

Then head over to Bug Girl’s blog for some additional cases of creationists threatening scientists with violence, and this post on the Kanawha Texboook incident, in which Christians led by a local reverend burned down elementary schools, planted bombs in school busses, and shot at people because they were upset over a recommended reading list for schoolchildren.

And as you do this, think about this for a moment: It is the creationists who shrilly insist that only through their god can anyone have any morality. Yet they are the ones burning elementary schools down, killing their enemies, getting them fired from their jobs, and threatening them with violence when they don’t get their way. This is wrong. If you are reading this, you are learning about the wrong-ness of all this behavior from a scientist; it isn’t coming out of the bible and I don’t claim any particular religious inspiration for this realization. What we have here, folks, is the moral and ethical result of my simple, straightforward, evolved sense of altruism: it is wrong to resort to violence against people you simply disagree with.

And also consider that the creationists - the same ones who resort to harassment, threats, and violence - have made allegations that scientists are the ones making the threats and getting people fired. But of course, that isn’t true - and it makes perfect sense: why would we be surprised that the kind of people who would set fire to an elementary school when they don’t get their way would shrink from lying?

I just learned from Denialism Blog that terrorists have set fire to a UCLA professor’s house. An LA Times story (registration required) reports that some sort of incendiary device set the house aflame:

The device was placed Monday morning (February 4) on the front porch of a Westside house owned by Edythe London, FBI officials in Los Angeles said.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller confirmed that officials with the Joint Terrorism Task Force were investigating the incident.

“It was ignited and caused damage to the property,” Eimiller said. “No one was home at the time and nobody was hurt.”

Eimiller said no one had claimed responsibility. But the agency is investigating the allegation that the Animal Liberation Front used a garden hose to flood London’s house Oct. 20 in an attempt to stop her animal experiments.

The victim, Edythe London, is a researcher at UCLA who studies addiction to nicotine, methamphetamine, and alcohol. Her research has resulted in a better understanding of addiction, and better treatments to help people addicted to drugs to recover, and subsequently live better, more productive lives. Although this has helped drug abusers - and their primary victims, their families and communities - the research has helped millions more. London has developed new ways to study brain function, and almost anyone with a head injury, neurological disease, or learning disability has befitted in one way or another from London’s twenty or so years of research.

“Animal-rights” terrorists want to kill her because some of her work involves the use of lab monkeys. They’ve already successfully attacked her house once, doing $20,000 to $30,000 worth of damage by flooding it. The terrorists who claimed credit for doing that, calling themselves the Animal Liberation Front, said at the time they they were torn between flooding the house and burning it down.

Now they have come back, and since vandalism didn’t work, they’re trying to kill her.

She looks like a huge threat, doesn’t she? Why, just by looking at her, you can tell that she’s evil, fire-breathing spawn of demons.¹ And obviously any attractive middle-aged women named Edyth must be at the root of the collapse of civilization.

London has written about why she uses animals in some of her research. It is a thoughtful explanation of her opinions. This gentle, peaceful explanation of the subject is answered with violence. Her opponents can’t be bothered to put forth a vigorous argument in response - they have to try to kill those who disagree with them.

The people who want her dead have put her home address on a public website, disguising their intent by claiming they just want to distribute flyers in her neighborhood. If this is all they wanted to do, they could just disclose which city block she lives on. Instead, they publish the house number. The intent is clear enough - they want to target her specifically. They want to intimidate her by letting her know that any crackpot who wants to believe they are doing God’s work by killing someone can find her easily.

They have also taken quotations from her research papers out of context and reproduced them in a misleading way. No doubt this serves to fire up their fellow-travellers, and makes it seem as though their violent and deadly actions are somehow justified.

That, incidentally, is the typical tactic of all antiscience malcontents. I’m not sure it is actually possible to oppose science by telling the truth. So the socially maladjusted just make stuff up and pretend that what they say has something to do with reality. In this particular case, if they get what they want they will halt all progress in understanding biology and medicine. And not just by killing all the the researchers, although I’m sure they’d find that good sport - but by banning all research.

I recently commented on the skepchick blog about how to recognize an extremist:

The way that you know that you are dealing with a minority extremist sect of a larger movement is that the larger movement works to morally condemn and limit the influence of the minority sect.

I’m concerned that the violent are the mainstream in the so-called “animal rights” movement. A simple google search turns up not a single example of an animal rights activist condemning this attempted killing of a woman, their family, and depending on how well their IEDs work, her neighbors.

1. If you don’t get this, please look up the definition of sarcasm. [↩]