Check this out

Since I've been admittingly slacking off on my blog duties, I thought I'd share an article written by Katha Pollit in this week's The Nation, Intelligible Design. The article links the promotion of Intelligent Design and a literal interpretation of the Bible with policies by the right that are hurting our country.

Fascinating stuff:

And if what we're looking at is an America with an ever-larger and boxed-in working class and tighter competition for high-paying jobs among the elite, fundamentalism is exactly the thing to manage decline: It schools the downwardly mobile in making the best of their lot while teaching them to be grateful for the food pantry and daycare over at the church. At the same time, taking advantage of existing currents of anti-intellectualism and school-tax resistance, it removes from the pool of potential scientists and other creative professionals vast numbers of students, who will have had their minds befuddled with creationism and its smooth-talking cousin, intelligent design.

Of special interest to me, Pollitt questions how right wingers can blame the left for a rise in single mothers (something they deem the source of all evil in this country). Restricting access to contraceptives, information, and abortion seems a bit counterintuitive to me if you want to reduce unplanned pregnancy...but who am I to judge?

Another mystery potentially explained: Government's determination to keep working-class women from controlling their fertility. Why does it set a biological trap that dooms them to years of struggle with repercussions for everyone around them, including their children? (It's true that teen pregnancy rates are going down, but they're still astronomical by the standards of any other industrial nation--six times the rate in the Devil's own country, France.) For all our talk about single-parent families--the reason for the terrible poverty of black New Orleans, if we are to believe right-wing columnists Rich Lowry and David Brooks--we act to bring about more of them, and of the most vulnerable, makeshift kind. Somehow single motherhood is supposed to be the fault of the left, but it's the right that has cut public funding for contraception, held up Plan B, restricted abortion, flooded the schools with useless abstinence-only sex ed and now even threatens to bar confidentiality to girls seeking birth control. If you wanted a fatalistic, disorganized working class, a working class too worn out by the day-to-day to do much more than get by, saddling girls with babies is a great idea.

I think Pollitt sums up the problem perfectly--"A government that doesn't believe in government was a disaster waiting to happen."

What are you waiting for? Go read the whole thing.