Do you need another reason to despise Answers in Genesis?

Sure, they’re young earth creationists. That’s ridiculous enough, a view that is in complete denial of all of the evidence, and it makes them a fringe group that, if they didn’t have so much political influence, could be safely ignored. Just the fact that they reject the entirety of science ought to make them pariahs.

By the way, my latest reading is Martin Rudwick’s Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters, a very good book on the history of science, and I have to quote a paragraph from the introduction, in which he argues against the simplistic claim that it’s just Science vs. Religion.

…I try to show how an emerging sense of the Earth’s deep history was related to earlier conceptions of a much briefer kind of history in far more interesting and important ways than this tired stereotype allows. The surprising revival of “young Earth” ideas by some modern religious fundamentalists, and the even more surprising political power of such ideas in certain parts of the world, should not distract us from tracing the main story. I deal briefly with the modern creationists at the very end of this book, but in such a way that I hope it will be clear that they are a bizarre sideshow, not the climax of the narrative.

Even as a bizarre sideshow, though, their beliefs have social and political repercussions, and unfortunately, belief in creationism has a host of correlated consequences.

One of those consequences is the possession of a set of rigid sexual mores that defy biological reality. Another of the horrible, nonsensical ideas that AiG promotes is that gender is fixed and unchangeable, ordained by God, and so transgender people are freakish abominations who should not be accommodated in any way.

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Chivalry!

I guess this fellow was just trying to bring back traditional values.

A man punched a pregnant woman, tossed her to the ground, kicked her and told her he was going to kill her baby — all because she didn’t thank him for holding the door, according to the victim and NYPD.

"He said, ‘I’m going to kick this baby out of your womb,’" victim Lakeeya Walker told DNAinfo New York.

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Ben Ketchum doesn’t seem to be a very nice guy

Ashley Manta was discussing her own rape trauma with a friend, when she named her rapist: a fellow named Ben Ketchum. There followed one of those series of confirmations that are rather terrifying: her friend had also been raped by Ketchum. Then she put up a blog post naming her rapist, and more women who knew him came out to say what he’d done.

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