Dan Phelps just reminded me of a laughable example of how wrong Hank Campbell can be. This is something he wrote in 2010.
In another chapter in the Democratic War on Science, Kentucky scientists are concerned about Democratic Governor Steve Beshear’s announcement that the state is partnering with Answers in Genesis (AIG) to create “Ark Encounter,” to make what developers call a full-scale ark including models of dinosaurs. Cost: $150 million.
Yeah, he actually has a series of posts on how the Democrats are the anti-science party, unlike the Republicans.
It has dinosaurs, so these are not the young earth creationists who believe in no science at all (dinosaurs did not exist 6,000 years ago, obviously) but Daniel Phelps, an environmental geologist for the state, believes the tax breaks the park will get (it claims to be creating 900 jobs) is “government entanglement with religion”.
Emphasis mine. Uh, Hank…they claim the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that dinosaurs didn’t go extinct until the Middle Ages.
“I don’t envision people, especially those with science backgrounds, wanting to move to a state where the ‘ark park’ has government support,” says Phelps, though providing tax breaks for anyone creating jobs is not really government support. If anything, it would be discrimination not to give them the same tax breaks it would provide to a company engaged in paleontology.
If a group of paleontologists opened a business and declared that no employee would be hired if they were Christian, that would be the proper comparison. You know that AiG demands that all employees agree to a statement of faith, right?
And doesn’t Phelps live in Kentucky, since he is president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society? Would he not move there because an ark has dinosaurs at a theme park? He must not visit Disney World because he can’t actually travel Back to the Future either.
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Dan Phelps has lived in Kentucky longer than AiG has.
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You do realize it’s not a problem to have dinosaurs in a theme park, right? The problem is a theme park that outright lies about the science.
I do wonder if Campbell has been informed about Answers in Genesis’s agenda yet. That thing read like an Emily Latella routine, without a punchline.
What else was in that margarita?
So… is Campbell a true believer, or is he just mindlessly pro-business?
Well… he did refer to Jeff Brown as “arguably the most anti-science governor” and California as “(arguably) the most anti-science state in the country”.
Apparently his pet topic (which happens to align with business interest pretty well, how convenient) is the one and only topic in science. Everything else either doesn’t count, or “should not be politicized”.
He sometimes pays lip service to vaccination, however, CA eliminating personal belief exemptions for vaccination (SB-277 in 2015) doesn’t help in its “most anti-science” title, so lip service indeed.
My guess is that he’s just lobbing Tu quoques at the Democrats. The Right seems to think that supposed hypocrisy somehow invalidates all their opponent’s positions.
AstrySol @3
So, he calls Jerry Brown “the most anti-science governor in the country” for questioning the safety of pesticides, something that tons of scientists also question, while defending creationists as “not being completely anti-science” because they at least think that dinosaurs existed. Yeah, Campbell’s priorities are completely fucked.