Summary: On this Independence Day, there may not be a lot to celebrate. We seem to live in a time in which, at least according to the Supreme Court, “sincerely held belief,” even if it denies the sphericity of the earth, trumps scientific literacy and understanding. We are engaged in a headlong flight from the ideals of the Enlightenment that called forth the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. 40% of Americans reject evolution and embrace creationism. On both the left and right, anti-vaxxers and homeschoolers put their children at risk for adverse health consequences or being religiously trained but otherwise illiterate. George Clemenceau was more right than he knew what he described America as the only society that has gone from barbarism to decadence without the customary interval of civilization. The booboisie are in the driver’s seat, and they are running us over a cliff. That’s not something one prefers to celebrate on Independence Day.
This Independence Day, it’s hard to get into a mood of flagwagging American Kiplingism.
Almost twelvescore years ago, our forebears initiated perhaps the most singular and progressive work ever undertaken by the art or wit of humankind. Bringing forth what Abraham Lincoln famously described as “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” the signers of the Declaration of Independence can have had only the faintest idea of what might become of the independent country they called into being on a sweaty, steamy, muggy Philadelphia afternoon in the summer of 1776.
Unfortunately, the idea that we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights is not one that sits well with a large number of Americans.
In the days since the Supreme Court announced its egregious Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby decision, the somber predictions set forth in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent has started to come largely true. Social conservatives —- the kind who have never quite reconciled themselves to the presence of women or people of color as first-class citizens in our American commonwealth —– now find themselves lining up to argue the extraordinary proposition that if “sincerely held belief” can trump basic scientific literacy, then “sincerely held belief” can also be invoked to allow all manner of invidious discrimination against people of color, women, and, most particularly, queerfolk.
Because in Hobby Lobby, the five male Roman Catholics who made up Court majority in that case apparently decided that it is more important that a corporation should enjoy constitutional and statutory solicitude for being wrong, as long as a corporation can veil its wrongness in a gaudy chasuble of ostensibly sincere so-called religious belief.
By declaring that so-called sincerely held beliefs trump science, the Court has given legal sanction to flat-earthers, climate change denialists, wild-eyed conspiracists, and nut cases of just about every conceivable description a wholly unjustified legal leg to stand on. The Court has also contrived to make itself complicit in America’s headlong flight from the Enlightenment ideals and principles that were so instrumental in calling forth the revolutionary document that was and is the Declaration of Independence.
Today, an estimated two fifths of Americans reject the basic notion of Darwinian evolution. Millions of Americans process a touching, yet wholly unsupported, belief in so-called Young Earth creationism. Indeed, so deep has the creationist rot penetrated our body politic that in South Carolina, a relatively anodyne measure to declare a form of mammoth to be the official state fossil has become a flashpoint for a protracted and embarrassing debate in that state’s legislature over creationism and evolution. Clearly, if unsurprisingly, there is something wrong in South Carolina.
Yet, South Carolina isn’t the only place where what H.L. Mencken famously derided as the Booboisie seems to be in control. The inmates are out of the asylum all over the country. When Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos played on millions of American televisions this spring, the creationist right, with some help from their friends in the Republican Party, went batshit (or, perhaps, to use Rachel Maddow’s more polite phrasing, psycho-guano) and started demanding equal time for creationist views.
And if the creationist right feels comfortable making itself look foolish going psycho-guano over Dr. Tyson’s television series, it feels equally comfortable depriving millions of Americans schoolchildren of a quality scientific education by encouraging fearful parents either to homeschool their children or to send them to sectarian schools which, in terms of the educational rigor of their curricula, are often little more than right wing Jesus madrassas. As much as left-wing anti-vaxxers have put their children at risk by subscribing to debunked and fraudulent theories about links between autism and vaccinations for childhood illnesses, right-wing homeschoolers have put their children at risk by “teaching” them only those few disprovable notions which comport with a religious right weltanschauung.
Who is to say which parent does worse by his or her child and by the body politic at large? Is it the right wing homeschooler or the left-wing anti-vaxxer? Either way, both the anti-vaccination movement and the homeschooling movement reflect the dangerous extent to which America has a willfully and deliberately turned her back on the Enlightenment. Is it any wonder why the other industrialized nations of the world look at us with a scornful wonder? Is it any wonder why, the better part of a century ago, Georges Clemenceau described America as being the only society which had gone from barbarism to decadence without the customary interval of civilization?
We are, after all, the country the treated the world to the unedifying spectacle of the Scopes monkey trial, and we are the same country that today treats the world to the unedifying spectacle of high-profile conservative politicians mouthing creationist drivel. There is something seriously wrong when Kansas Governor Sam Brownback and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee can blather on about Young Earth creationism, and where school boards all around the country can try to teach either outright Genesis-narrative creationism or promulgate so-called Intelligent Design curricula that are nothing more than stalking horses for Young Earth creationism. The booboisie seem to be in the driver seat; they’re running us over a cliff, and that’s not something I prefer to celebrate on this Independence Day.
