When fundies attack

One typically wouldn't think of largely-urbanized (at least on the east side) Palm Beach County as a comfortable place for batshit crazy fundamentalist Christians ... but perhaps it's not the quantity but the volume that makes the difference.

Laura Lopez of West Palm Beach has been trying unsuccessfully since September to persuade the Palm Beach County School Board to remove certain books that deal with homosexuality and evolution, among other things.

Lopez had 15 minutes to make her case during a school board workshop. She listed a litany of sins that she says are promoted by books she found doing a simple key word search on the library computers at Dreyfoos School of the Arts and Royal Palm Beach High School. She acknowledged she hadn't read a single one of the books cover-to-cover.

Among the objectionable books were: Medical Ethics: Moral and Legal Conflicts in Health Care, Coping When a Parent is Gay and The Cider House Rules, a John Irving novel about a rural doctor who runs an orphanage and performs illegal abortions.

She also expanded her objections to include the curriculum taught in schools.

"They're teaching kids the Big Bang. They're teaching kids lies," she told the board. "The world was created 6,000 years ago. In my son's elementary school book, it says the world was created several million years ago."

I don't have a problem with people believing theories from the Bible. Hell, I don't even object to people advocating them in the appropriate places and times. But it's the irrational, willful rejection of provable (and proven) scientific facts and, worse yet, the insistence that those facts shouldn't be taught in public schools that get my dander up.

Ms. Lopez appears to have created a difference of opinion in her own home:

One of Lopez's two teenaged sons, Jesse, a sophomore at Royal Palm Beach, came to support his mother. Her oldest son, whom she did not name, does not agree with his mother's objections to the library books.

Jesse Lopez said he worries about his fellow classmates who turn to friends for information, who may consult books full of lies. "If their friends rely on them and if those books are teaching evil, that's just corrupt," he said.

Well, kudos for the PBC School Board for hearing Ms. Lopez out and for making the right decision. But it's just sad when someone's religious beliefs get in the way of their ability to make sound, rational decisions.

Isn't that right, Mr. President?