Alright, This Is Getting Out of Hand

John McCain boards the Doofus Science Express:

On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement.   McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes "all points of view" should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.   The theory of intelligent design says life is too complex to have developed through evolution, and that a higher power must have had a hand in guiding it.

The NYTimes has been doing a series of articles this week on the debate over evolution and intelligent design and the New Republic had a cover story on it, and I'll do a post summarising them later.

Awhile back, I pointed to a Matthew Yglesias post about ignoring this whole sideshow debate, which I agreed with to some degree. But it's becoming obvious that this is becoming too much of an issue to ignore. As my pal Kat commented:

Giving way and allowing a "harmless" (but kooky and unprovable) non-"theory" like Intelligent Design into the science classroom just opens the door for all sorts of other unverifiable religious crap that might get flung in as well.
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At any rate, I don't think progressives need to take their eye of the ball when it comes to equality, reproductive rights, etc while at the same time defending the integrity of public education.