Truth be told, I’m not even that strict about apostrophes and plurals. I don’t mind seeing “1990′s” even though some would advise against it. To be honest, I don’t think it looks any worse than “1990s.” And I don’t mind an apostrophe in most abbreviations (VIP’s or TD’s or whatever). So I’m pretty damn lenient about this issue. But when I see people taking run of the mill words and sticking completely unnecessary apostrophes into their plural forms, I feel like vomiting. On the plus side, I also get to feel superior to all the idiots in the world who don’t know the rules of English grammar, but the nausea is a problem. Sometimes people stick apostrophes into words that aren’t even plural. For examples, see Apostrophe Abuse.

P.S. As always, my resource for the English language is the second edition of the Writing Handbook by Bernard Streicher, S.J., a revision of an earlier work by his fellow Jesuits, Kammer and Mulligan. It is undoubtedly the finest contribution the Jesuits have made to modern American society.

When the Falcons turned the ball over on downs, I believe there was 1:49 left. (The play-by-play recaps from ESPN and yahoo.com say 1:42, but that’s not what I remember while I was watching the game.) The Falcons had one timeout left. A kneeldown takes two seconds or so. If the Saints kneel down, the Falcons would presumably call a timeout immediately. 2nd down, 1:47 to go. The Saints kneel again, and they run 40 seconds off the play clock. They wouldn’t need to snap the ball on 3rd down until 1:05. They take another two seconds off the clock with the 3rd down kneel down, then run 40 more seconds off the clock. Given that the Saints were just inside Atlanta territory, they could easily take a delay of game penalty on 4th down, bringing the clock to 23 seconds.

With 23 seconds left, there is really no conceivable way the Falcons can win. I wouldn’t be advocating this approach in a one-possession ball game, but in a two-possession game there is really no way for the Falcons to win. Even if Drew Brees sets the ball on the ground and the Saints let the Falcons grab the ball and run it into the endzone, they’d still burn eight or ten seconds off the clock and have to onside kick with 14 or 15 seconds left, then recover an onside kick, then get the ball into field goal range AND kick a field goal (if the two-point conversion was successful), or score another TD (if the two-point try failed). And keep in mind, they’d have no time-outs to pull this off. Instead, Sean Payton, who realized he couldn’t run out the clock entirely with kneeldowns, opted to run for the first down. Granted, what happened next was unlikely, but why risk it? Under NFL rules, Goodwin’s injury forced the Saints to take a time-out, stopping the clock. And what did Atlanta want to do? Stop the clock! It’s a tough break, but if you kneel the ball the odds of getting injured are virtually nil unless the other team takes a cheap shot—in which case they’d probably get a 15-yard penalty, effectively ending the game. Second down, a run for no gain, and Atlanta uses the timeout they didn’t have to take on first down. At this point, a kneel-down would still get the clock down to 51 seconds before the Saints would have to punt. And a running play is unlikely to gain ten yards with the Falcons packing men into the box. Hell, the better play call might have been a pass in that situation—we had, after all, just witnessed a great third & goal touchdown on a swing pass to Pierre Thomas.* A play fake followed by a pass to one of the Saints’ big, tall, sure-handed receivers, especially Colston or Shockey, would have been far more likely to result in a first down than a running play. Instead, the run play resulted in a turnover, which gaves Atlanta the ball—and stopped the clock. The Saints should have been able to take roughly 1:26 off the clock, and instead they took 0:19. Horrendous.

Atlanta goes down the field and kicks a field goal. That was a stupid decision on their part. Granted, they had 4th-and-9, but the odds of getting a touchdown from the New Orleans 22-yard-line, then recovering an onside kick, then getting a field goal, are a lot better than the odds of kicking the field goal, then getting the onside kick, then scoring a touchdown. They were only 22 yards from the end zone at that point, but choosing to kick left them with more than 60 yards to go to tie the game should they recover the onside kick, compared with needing 30 yards to get into field goal range should they score a touchdown. Coaches always take the safe route here, extending the game for as long as they can; that’s why a team that’s down by 15 points always kicks the extra point if they score a touchdown, leaving the two-point conversion for later.**

Then Atlanta gets the ball on the onside kick, they pick up a first down, then a desperation heave fails. It should never have come to that.

So what should the Saints have done had they been taken a knee three times, leaving 23 seconds on the clock? A punt takes a little under two seconds from the start of the snap to the ball leaving the punter’s foot, then roughly four seconds of hang time. So that’s a bare minimum 6 seconds off the clock, plus another second if it’s a fair catch, or another few seconds if it bounces around (even if it bounces into the end zone for a touchback), or another few seconds if it’s returned. Even a touchdown return would likely take quite a while. For example, Chad Jones’s 93-yard punt return against Mississippi State earlier this season took 18 seconds from the time he caught it till the time he crossed the goal line. Granted, it wasn’t the fastest return, but it was hardly the slowest. In any case, a football player in pads carrying a football would need at least ten seconds to cover the length of the field even if no one was trying to stop him. So it’d be damn near impossible to have more than 3 or 4 seconds on the clock after a TD return, if any time even remained at all.

But now that I think about it, I’m not even sure a punt would be the best option. The safest option would be to kneel the ball again. Falcons take over at midfield with twenty seconds to go. Better yet, have the quarterback run backwards (or handoff to a runner who would run backwards), even to the point of running out of the back of their own end zone to take a safety (in which case the Saints would still have a nine-point—i.e. a two-possession—lead). With fifty yards to cover, such a play would take at least seven or eight seconds, and it’s highly doubtful anyone could catch Reggie Bush running toward his own goal line. The Saints would then punt the free kick from their 20-yard line up by nine with roughly fifteen seconds remaining. No way the Falcons score nine points in fifteen seconds.

Alternatively, the Saints could spread the field in a four- or five-wide set and throw a Hail Mary. If the Falcons blitz, Drew Brees would have a very good chance of hitting a receiver in man coverage for a first down. If not, you can throw a Hail Mary. Such a play would take at least a couple of seconds for the receivers to get downfield, then a few seconds of hangtime in the air. If the Saints catch it, that seals the win. If the Falcons stupidly pick it off, they have the ball at their own twenty or inside it with fifteen or so seconds remaining.*** If the Falcons knock it down, they get the ball at midfield, but again, they only have fifteen or so seconds remaining.

I think it’s clear that all of my proposed options are better than the outcome of what happened. I’m a huge fan of Sean Payton, he knows a hell of a lot more about football than I do, but he screwed up in deciding not to kneel the ball. Sure the Saints may very well have gotten a first down, in which case this blunder would have been overlooked. But the key thing to remember is this: minimize the risk involved. Yes, the odds of bad things happening are pretty small. Yes, what happened on that drive was almost a worst case scenario, and it was still very unlikely that the Falcons could come back to tie it. But kneeling the ball would have guaranteed**** giving the ball back to the Falcons with less than 20 seconds left, at which point the Falcons would have had such a small chance of winning that it might as well be non-existent. Hopefully there won’t be any similar mistakes for the Saints during the rest of the season.

* The man sitting next to me at the bar said of the Pierre Thomas TD reception and somersault into the endzone: “He look like he be doin’ dat pole vault shit.” Yes, that is a direct quote.

** Admittedly this isn’t the most drastic application of the principle that teams should score a touchdown first, then go for a field goal. Sometimes coaches will be down ten or eleven points and have fourth-and-goal from the three- or four-yard line and will kick a field goal, which is just idiotic. At least the relatively long distances involved (nine yards for the first, twenty-two for the touchdown) make it a semi-defensible decision here. And BTW, though he didn’t make a note of it in the Saints-Falcons game, Gregg Easterbrook frequently mentions occurrences like this in his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN.com’s Page 2. If you’re a football fan, you absolutely must read it every week during the football season. Not only is he a superb football analyst, he also includes excellent insights into politics, current events, science, game theory, and loads of other topics. And he always includes at least a couple pictures of scantily clad cheerleaders. If you like that sort of thing.

*** One mental mistake defensive backs make far too often is intercepting a long pass on fourth down when knocking it down would give them much better field position. Any pass thrown beyond the line of scrimmage should be knocked down on 4th down rather than intercepted unless the player has a clear shot at returning the ball past the original line of scrimmage. I’ve seen defenders screw their team out of forty yards of field position with mistakes like that.

**** Okay, in theory they could fumble the snap. But in my lifetime I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fumbled snap on a kneeldown. The closest thing I can think of is the Miracle at the Meadowlands, which happened on a 1978 play which wasn’t a kneeldown. And it wasn’t a bad snap, but a bad handoff.

Things I don’t like about Halloween:

The costumes. Now, lots of people have amazing, hilarious, clever costumes. But if you’re going to do Halloween right, you have to have a costume. You look like a tool if you don’t, and if you just half-ass it you still look like a tool. So partaking in Halloween requires three things: creativity (to come up with a great costume idea), hard work (to actually pull said idea off), and a certain degree of exhibitionism (because any costume is ultimately a plea of “Hey, look at me!”). I’m pretty lacking in all three of those areas. I’m always amazed at the costume ideas people come up with—all sorts of things I’d never think of. And the amount of time, money, and work involved in pulling off a good costume is way too high. And, despite the fact that I have a blog, and despite the fact that I do like to think of myself as a very, very, very minor celebrity, and despite the fact that I do enjoy performing (an exhibitionist hobby if there ever were one), I don’t need the attention that comes from the perfect, outrageous, intelligent costume. And the problem with Halloween that you need to have some sort of costume. At least with Mardi Gras you can just put on one of those striped purple green and gold rugby shirts and leave it at that. But with Halloween people are gonna judge you if your costume isn’t good. So why bother?

The crowds. In the days after last year’s Halloween, I talked to people I knew about what they had done for Halloween, and just about every single person said, “We were on Frenchman Street.” Everybody. From every possible group, from the theatre people—whether high schoolers and college students or people old enough to have AARP cards—to my friends from grad school, to the Indian UNO students I play cricket with. Extrapolating from the percentages of people who told me they were there, I concluded that roughly 472,518 people were on Frenchman Street for Halloween. That’s way too many people. I don’t mind a crowd every now and then but that’s just ridiculous.

Things I do like:

The fun size Crunch bars. Oh man those things are awesome. Don’t come to my house expecting any of those; they’re all for me.
The scantily clad women. But in the days of facebook, you can just wait for those pictures to show up on the internet, you don’t actually have to get out on Halloween for that.

So see, the two things I do like, I don’t have to leave my house for. And leaving my house causes both of the things I don’t like. So I’ll be enjoying Halloween from the couch in front of the 46-inch high-def flat screen TV.

I guess before I continue I should try to set out some sort of definition. As this article from the Sydney Morning Herald points out, it’s hard to define, but “you know it when you see it.” I think in lieu of a conventional definition, you need some kind of checklist. A hipster doesn’t need to have all of these things, but the more matches, the more likely you’re looking at a hipster.

1. Skinny jeans (especially on males).
2. Ridiculous looking hat.
3. Ridiculous looking glasses. Even if they have 20/20 vision.
4. Ridiculous looking sunglasses (usually with each lens roughly the size of a backyard).
5. Dyed hair—the stranger the color, the better. Bonus points for multiple colors.
6. Converses—again, the stranger the color, the better. Bonus points for wearing a different color shoe on each foot (I once had a Greek professor, a guy in his late twenties, who did that).
7. Piercings in places where they shouldn’t go.
8. Cigarettes (preferably cloves, but then the hipsters’ darling Obama banned them, but they seem willing to give him a pass for that because they believe Obama can do no wrong).
9. T-shirts from bands you’ve never heard of.
10. T-shirts from early-90s nintendo games you’ve never heard of.
11. T-shirts from anything else you’ve never heard of.
12. T-shirts from things you have heard of, but worn “ironically,” whatever the hell that means.
13. 75 layers of clothes. Every layer is either too big or too small. And at least one of those layers is a scarf.
14. Blazers from the 70s, bought at a thrift store.
15. Cheap booze, like Pabst Blue Ribbon or boxed wine. Not because they’re actually poor, but letting everyone know that their parents are paying for/paying off loans for the $50k/year tuition for their private university/liberal arts college wouldn’t be cool. (N.B. I’ve already mentioned that I hate booze snobs, but drinking something cheap because other people drink it is just as bad as drinking something expensive because other people drink it.)
16. Bumper stickers. Preferably something like Nader 2000. Or a parody of a better-known bumper sticker or slogan.
17. Messenger bags. With a MacBook inside, natch.
18. V-neck t-shirts.
19. Che Guevara t-shirts.
20. Peasant skirts (especially on males).

Now, I’m sure some people reading this are hipsters, even if they wouldn’t admit it. (As this excellent article details, “hipster” is something of a dirty word among hipsters.) If you are, and you know me, assume I think you’re one of those hipsters who isn’t annoying. In all groups of people, there are always at least a few decent people. There are some people whom I consider hipsters I really respect—they avoid most of the ridiculous fashions I mentioned above, they know all the great bars and restaurants I’ve never heard of, they do all the things I know I should do but don’t (bicycling, going to farmers’ markets, seeing live music, etc). So, my friends, if you think I think you’re a hipster, assume you fall into that group.

Jason Robert Brown? Every damn thing is for a tenor, with the exception of Leo Frank, which is a baritone role, but one that demands a pretty good falsetto. Stephen Schwartz? Pippin, Jesus, and Fiyero are all tenor roles. And in Children of Eden, one of my all-time favorite musicals, all three of the leading guy roles (Father, Adam/Noah, and Cain/Japheth) require a high A-flat—which isn’t totally out of the question for a high baritone, but the tessitura sits horribly high in all of the big songs, so you’d have to be an outstanding baritenor to have a shot at those songs. I mean, really, Mr. Schwartz, you couldn’t have given one of those three roles to a baritone? They all had to be for tenors? Bastard. Likewise, I saw Next to Normal on Broadway when in was in NYC, and out of the four guy roles? Yep, four tenor roles, everyone from the doctor to the dad to the son to the daughter’s dorky boyfriend. I guess rock music is to blame. Back in the 40s and 50s, pop music was filled with baritone crooners like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and the like. You don’t hear voices like that much in popular music these days. Now it’s all screaming rockers, and that’s drifted into musical theatre as well. Take Rent, where all the male singing roles aside from Collins are about as high as can be.

There are certainly still a few good roles and songs for baritones, but they’ve become fewer and farther between. There used to be a balance, but that’s completely gone. I want to write a musical just so that I can make every single male role a baritone or bass role just to stick it to the damn tenors. Hell, I wouldn’t even let the bastards have a chorus part. Make ‘em sing with the women, where they belong—as the old saying goes, a tenor is halfway between a man and an alto.

Admittedly, that’s a small sample size, but a great many games have been decided in this way. It’s more of a problem now than when the NFL adopted the rule in 1974, because the percentage of made field goals has gone from 60.6% in 1974 to 84.5% in 2008. In every year from 2004 on kickers have made more than 80% of their field goal attempts. NFL kickers are all but automatic inside 40 yards, meaning a team only has to get to the 22- or 23-yard line to clinch a win. When kickers weren’t as good, the NFL’s overtime rule made much more sense.

It’s hard to think of a worse system. I’d love to see a 15-minute overtime played straight through with normal rules, but the players’ union would have justifiable reason to be upset at the extra wear and tear on their bodies. TMQ had a column this February about a number of proposed reforms, including one from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell himself. Goodell suggested not allowing the team that gets the ball first to win the game with a field goal. That’s not a bad idea. A lot of the arguments in favor of the current rule or of that proposal suggest that if you can’t play enough defense to get a stop, you don’t deserve to win. That’s all well and good in may situations, especially if a touchdown is required, but when two high-powered offenses meet even a touchdown can be too easy to come by. Easterbrook (a vocal proponent of going for it on 4th down) suggests playing a full fifteen minutes but without punts, field goals, or PAT kicks. Again, I think the players’ union would take issue with this, and I don’t like unnecessarily taking the punters and kickers out of the game—why should they be benched for the whole overtime when they’re a vital part of the first 60 minutes of the game? Two of his readers suggest requiring that a team take a four- or six-point lead, and Easterbrook ultimately sides with simply getting rid of overtime field goals, but again, I think this is unfair when two very good offenses meet. But I think it’s safe to say that all of these proposals are a good deal better than the current rule.

Some of the more interesting suggestions turn the overtime coin toss into some sort of auction. Either one team chooses where the ball will be placed and the other side chooses offense or defense; each team makes a sealed bid with where they are willing to start with the ball and the team that has a bid farther away from the opponent’s end zone wins; or the referee conducts a live auction with the teams bidding for where they’ll start. But I can’t see the NFL choosing any of these—a little too theoretical.

My proposal is simple, and has been used by the Arena League and the new UFL. If a team scores on the first possession, the other team gets a chance to match it (or better it). If both teams score touchdowns on the first possession and the team that scored first scores again on its next possession, the second team gets another chance to match it (and so on as long as TDs keep happening). Otherwise, it’s sudden death. Again, it’s not a perfect system—the team that scores first still has an advantage—but if the teams trade field goals on the first possession and the first team kicks a field goal to win on its second possession, at least the second team’s offense had a chance to score a TD.

1) The fact that you can’t walk around drinking. Growing up in New Orleans, I think it wasn’t until I was 15 or 16 when I learned that people in other parts of the country can’t walk down the street with an alcoholic beverage. I was pretty shocked when I found out. What’s the harm? And New York would be the absolute perfect city to allow public drinking. No one ever drives; you can take the subway (the public transit there is the practically the 8th wonder of the world) or a taxi everywhere you want to go, so you never have to worry about drunk driving. Wouldn’t it be great to walk around Times Square as if you were walking down Bourbon Street? NYC needs to get on this, stat. And while they’re at it, how about a casino? NYC and the state lose tons and tons of money to Atlantic City and Connecticut, and the underground games there are perhaps the busiest in the country, what with people like Alex Rodriguez frequenting them. NYC would be able to print money in tax revenue.

2) The 1 train. It sucks. There’s a reason Duke Ellington told people to “Take The ‘A’ Train.”* The A train is pretty awesome. It’s an express train, so it’s fast, you can get from JFK to Midtown Manhattan to Harlem and lots of other places. And there’s a local subway, the C train, following most of the same line in Manhattan, so it doesn’t get too crowded. But the 1 train sucks. Back when there was a 9 train it probably didn’t suck so bad. But the 2 and the 3 trains split off at 96th, so anyone north of that has to get on the 1 if they want a subway on that line. I tried to ride it on a Saturday from Lincoln Center up to 145th and it was horrible. Slow, crowded, just plain terrible. At least when there was a 9 train I assume it took some of the burden off the 1. None of that now. I’d happily walk a few extra blocks to take the A instead of that pathetic excuse for a subway line that is the 1 train.

3) The noise. Maybe this just goes with living in an apartment building no matter where it is, but do people in NYC ever shut up? Blasting music at 2 in the morning just isn’t cool, folks. And it’s even worse if you stay in Midtown, as I usually do. Cars and police sirens and people and so on…no rest for weary ears.

4) Public urination. I saw a guy pissing up against a school building. Stay classy, Harlem. Of course, I guess NOLA has its fair share of this problem. But at least it’s understandable, since we do allow drinking in public.

5) The Archdiocese of New York’s lousy website. You can’t figure out which times each parish has Masses unless that parish has a website. And most of them don’t. How hard is it to have Mass times in the listing when you search for a church? Also, while you can search by ZIP code, you can’t enter an address and have it spit out a list of churches sorted by distance from that address. And if you try doing that on google, you get a whole bunch of non-Catholic churches, which isn’t much help for me.

6) Okay, this isn’t strictly New York-related, but I hate when the playbills from a Broadway show have covers in black and white instead of color. Sometimes black and white is fine, but when a show like Legally Blonde, whose entire promotional campaign was an extravaganza of pink, enough to make your eyes explode, prints a drab black and white cover, something is wrong. Same thing with Xanadu. After a brief search, apparently some shows open with color covers and then switch to the cheaper B&W later in the run. And I don’t get why people just leave playbills in their seats when they see a show. Hell, half the time I grab extras to bring to friends or keep in my collection. But I guess I’m a horrible pack rat.

* Note for the jazz pedants: Yes, I’m aware he didn’t actually write either the music or lyrics for the song. But he did make it famous.

Softball has these downfalls, and more. At least the others don’t require gloves or helmets or other equipment beyond the bat, ball, and bases. But softball? All of the equipment of baseball, none of the advantages.

Perhaps the biggest reason I hate softball is the sheer aesthetic displeasure it gives me. We’ve all heard the schoolyard insult, “You throw like a girl!”** Well, when you’re playing softball, you pretty much have no choice. The ball is too big to be thrown like a baseball with a nice, fluid motion–we’ve all marveled at a great throw by an outfielder to nab a runner at the plate or a third baseman gunning it across the diamond to prevent an infield single. And it’s too small to be thrown like a quarterback spiraling a football sixty yards down the field, or like a soccer goalkeeper distributing the ball with a long throw to his midfielders to start a counterattack. Throwing a softball leads to an ugly motion with the arm trailing awkwardly behind the rest of the body. There’s no fluidity, and it simply looks painful. Probably because any time you throw a softball, it is painful. In no way do I want to denigrate the athletic abilities of competitive female softball players.*** They are obviously very talented athletes who train extremely diligently. I just wish they’d play a sport that didn’t make me cringe on a routine grounder to the second baseman.

Second, when I read the paper and look through the line scores of high school softball games, the invariable result is something like: Team A 1 run 2 hits 0 errors Team B 0 runs 0 hits 0 errors, with each pitcher having twenty strikeouts. When that happens every now and then, it means you got to witness a great pitcher’s duel.**** When it happens every damn game, it means the game sucks.

I see no reason why women can’t just play baseball. They play basketball on the same size court as the men and that works out just fine. Hmm, guess I shouldn’t have bothered with that last comparison. Seriously, though, I think we’re past the days when girls needed their own version of a sport.

*Not too long ago, however, I did see a pretty cool PBS documentary on stickball, and it looked okay. And obviously, kickball is similar to baseball, but it is not a bat-and-ball sport, so I’m not saying it isn’t awesome. Because it is, of course.
**I, of course, discourage such callous sexism, but it’s pretty much true the vast majority of girls never learned how to throw a baseball (or football, or anything else) properly.
***If you’re a competitive male softball player, you need to get a life.
****And believe me, I love a good pitcher’s duel as much as anyone. One of the two major league games I’ve witnessed in person was this one, in which Damien Moss pitched eight innings, giving up just one hit, while the Braves were held scoreless until they tied the score at 1 in the eighth inning before Gary Sheffield won the game with a walk-off solo homer in the ninth.

Even if intelligent design could be considered science, it would clearly be bad science. The ID advocates have argued that blood clotting, the eye, a bacterium’s flagellum, and countless other structures and processes are “irreducibly complex”; in other words, there was no way they could have evolved because taking any of their parts out would lead to a useless, nonfunctioning structure. Every time they have tried to raise these objections they have been shown to be untrue.

And the ID advocates really aren’t all that concerned with science, anyway; they’re much more interested in PR. The leading body behind the ID movement is called the Discovery Institute, a think tank made up mostly of far-right evangelical Protestants who don’t have degrees in biology or anything similar. An internal memo, the “Wedge Document,” was leaked to the public in 1999. It listed some of the “Governing Goals” of the institute: “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” To bring this about, they launched a massive campaign directed at the public. Whenever they got exposure in the media, the scientific establishment had two choices: they could either stay silent and see the public, given only one side of the story, be swayed toward intelligent design; or they could debate the intelligent design proponents and give them the appearance of being credible scientists, making intelligent design look like a plausible position whose scientific truth had not yet been determined. The media loves conflict–the ratings are much better that way–and they love to set themselves up as impartial presenters.*

Much of the ID movement’s focus was on getting their neo-creationist viewpoint into public schools, under the guise of a “teach the controversy” campaign. They fought for control of school boards throughout the country, trying to get disclaimers into textbooks or force teachers to make statements of neutrality before teaching their classes about evolution.

When the ID advocates have been taken to court, they have almost always failed miserably. One of the most notable cases was Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, in which unhappy parents challenged Dover’s policy of requiring that intelligent design be taught as an alternative to evolution. The judge in that case determined that ID was not science and that it was a “mere re-labeling of creationism.” Teaching creationism in public school science classes had already been outlawed by the US Supreme Court in the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision. But that wouldn’t stop the creationists; they just sloppily revised and renamed their textbooks. Consider this chart, which was presented in the Kitzmiller case during the testimony of Barbara Forrest, one of the leading experts on the history of the creationist and ID movements. The chart is about an ID textbook called Of Pandas and People, which was actually a reworking of earlier creationist textbooks.

After the Supreme Court outlawed the teaching of creationism, its supporters scrambled to rename it.

Searching for “creationis” in a text file of the book produced hits for words such as “creationism,” “creationist,” and “creationists.” Note the dramatic change between the 1st and 2nd draft versions of Of Pandas and People. And furthermore, note the year: 1987. That’s the year the Supreme Court outlawed creationism in public schools. Reports like this make it obvious that they were trying to rework creationism in a stealthier guise. The intelligent design movement is basically the F-117 of creationism.

While scientists and judges have categorically rejected this neo-creationism, the public and politicians have been fooled far too often. Polls have consistently shown that shockingly low numbers of Americans “believe”** in evolution.*** The Santorum amendment to 2001′s No Child Left Behind Act, which essentially parroted the ID movement’s “teach the controversy” talking point, passed the Senate 91-8, though it eventually died in a conference committee.

Also, the insidiously named Louisiana Academic Freedom Act (later renamed the Louisiana Science Education Act) was signed into law in June 2008 after passing overwhelmingly in both houses. It claims to be about promoting “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories,” but it’s really about giving the neo-creationists entry into the classroom. In response many scientific societies have canceled plans to have conferences in New Orleans. The last thing this city and state needs is to scare away tourist dollars. I’ve been a fan of Bobby Jindal even before his failed 2003 gubernatorial campaign, but for him to sign such a bill was inexcusable. Far too much of his governorship has consisted of kowtowing to the far-right fringe of the Republican party, from signing this act to his taxpayer-funded helicopter tours to numerous Protestant churches in North Louisiana, to turning down hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus money to be used for high-speed rail projects. All of this smacks of building his street cred with the extremists voters when it comes time for the 2016 (or maybe even 2012) presidential primaries, rather than governing in the best interests of the state of Louisiana.

His support for the ID movement troubles me even more than it otherwise would because Bobby Jindal, like me, is a Catholic. Pope John Paul II’s comments on evolution made it clear that the church accepted the evidence scientists had been able to marshal in favor of evolution, and also made it clear that there was no conflict between believing in evolution and being a good Catholic. For Catholic politician Bobby Jindal to support the ID movement speaks to willful ignorance of science (even though he majored in biology at Brown), ignorance of Church teaching (a bit odd from a well-read convert who has been a steadfast defender of church policy on subjects such as abortion), or just plain sucking up to the religious right.

* Take Fox News’s slogan: “We Report, You Decide.” Regardless of your opinions on Fox News, it’s clear that they want to portray themselves as impartial, as simply presenting two or more sides on an issue without taking a stand.

** I wonder what percentage of Americans believe in gravity.

*** Sometimes, though, I wonder how much of it is due to sloppy wording in polls. Often I feel as though they try to phrase evolution in a way that is greatly dismissive of any compatibility between theism and evolution. But this Gallup poll seems pretty fairly worded, and yet only 39% said they believe in evolution.