I had thought this issue was settled...

After all the abuse I took for taking RFK Jr. and the mercury-autism activists to task for relying on shoddy science to promote a probably nonexistent link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism, I thought it was time to take a break and deal with a less controversial topic.

How about evolution?

I had thought that this issue was more or less settled, but it appears that the fundamentalists opposed to teaching the science of evolution are still at it. They're still pressuring museums--museums!--not to show IMAX films that refer to evolution. One example is Volcanoes of the Deep Sea. Its crime? It states that life originated in the oceans:

"Volcanos of the Deep Sea" has prompted some radical religious conservatives to blow their own tops.

But oceanographer Richard Lutz, who collaborated on the movie, said the controversy centered on "a reference in the film that life may have originated in the deep sea."

Museum owners downplay evolution as a reason for dumping the films, but there's little doubt that that's the real subtext lurking behind the fear of Museum owners to show these films in areas where there are large concentrations of fundamentalist Christians:

Earlier this year, the Museum of Science and History of Fort Worth, Texas, refused to show the volcano film after a screening for a test audience.

"At the time, we had better choices that scored better in our screening tests," said Margaret Ritsch, the museum's Director of Public Affairs.

She admitted, however, that some people had made comments about the theory of evolution.

Of course they did, and that was almost certainly the reason the Museum caved. It's not enough for these religious zealots simply to hold whatever religious beliefs they want about evolution, even if those beliefs are not consistent with what we know from science. They have to shut down any references to evolution and try to get their religious beliefs taught to other people's children as "science."

(Via fello RINO Right Thoughts, who was even harsher than I was about this. And, just for fun, a link to a fellow conservative-leaning blogger who doesn't drink the creationist Kool Aid either. As a West Virginian, he's all in favor of "dumbing down" his northern neighbors in Dover, where the school board has been trying to get "intelligent design" creationism in the high school curriculum, concluding, "I guess I shouldn't complain- we will take whatever competitive edge West Virginia can get." Finally, of course, there's always the Founder of the RINOs, the Commissar, who weighs in on the right's tendency to promote, or at least tolerate, antievolution antiscience in its ranks.)