Get Rid of These People

Just get them out of the government:

Important US research to reduce HIV infection may have been prevented in recent years because scientists have censored their funding requests in response to political controversy, according to a study published on Tuesday.

Writing in PLoS Medicine, the academic journal, Joanna Kempner from Rutgers University identified a “chilling effect” on researchers seeking grants from the government-backed National Institutes of Health after their work was questioned by Republican lawmakers and Christian groups.

The findings suggest politics influence scientists’ willingness to conduct research, and raise warnings at a time of continued sensitivity over medical research topics from sexual behaviour to stem cells.

Among 82 researchers polled by Ms Kempner, who had received money from the NIH, almost a quarter had dropped or reframed studies around sexual behaviour they judged to be politically sensitive, and four had made career changes and left academia as a result of the controversy.

Let me put it this way: do you really want these kinds of people, who worship ignorance and arrogance, with their shallow, mechanistic idea of morality, in a position to decide whether you live or die?

Via AmericaBlog.

Even some conservative pundits are starting to get it. (Parker's focus is too narrow: the brand of God in the public sphere that has been touted by the "Christian" right for thirty years is killing America, not just the Republican party.)

And trust Andrew Sullivan to come up with a quote from de Tocqueville:

I have no belief in the virtue or durability of official philosophies, and when it comes to state religions, I have always thought that, though they may perhaps sometimes momentarily serve the interests of political power, they are always sooner or later fatal for the church.

Nor am I one of those who think that to exalt religion in the eyes of the people and to do honor to the spirituality of religious teaching, it is good to give its ministers indirectly a political influence which the laws refuse.

I am so deeply convinced of the almost inevitable dangers which face beliefs when their interpreters take part in public affairs, and so firmly persuaded that at all costs Christianity must be maintained among the new democracies that I would rather shut priests up within their sanctuaries than allow them to leave them.

Combining church and state is bad for the church, and even worse for the state. Remember that the people I'm talking about -- James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Donald Wildmon, Elaine Gallagher, Tony Perkins, Fred Phelps, the whole crew -- while spending millions to spread the idea that some Americans are not worthy of being full citizens, have acquiesced in, and sometimes openly condoned, the kind of torture and brutality that has no place in a civilized nation. And it's been demonstrated far too often that they have no intention of living up to the standards that they want to impose on the rest of us.

Just get them back to the fringes where they belong.