Rep Warren Chisum apologizes, admits didn’t read material; no word from Rep Ben Bridges
From the Dallas Morning News:
AUSTIN – House Appropriations Chairman Warren Chisum said Wednesday that he’s “willing to apologize” for giving colleagues a document that contains what the Anti-Defamation League called “outrageous anti-Semitic material.”
“The stuff that causes conflicts between religious beliefs, you know, I’d never be a party to that,” Mr. Chisum said. “I’m willing to apologize if I’ve offended anyone.”
Chisum had distributed a memo from Georgia Rep Ben Bridges which claimed that evolution was a conspiracy perpetrated by Jewish scientists influenced by kabbala and “the Pharisee religion” in order to undermine Christianity. Bridges referred readers to a website for further information:
Mr. Chisum said he hadn’t looked at the Web site and didn’t realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn’t vet the material more carefully.
No word yet from Bridges, who has been battling evolution for several years on the grounds that it is a theory, rather than a “fact”.
But what of the website being championed by Bridges? It’s called Fixedearth.com, and is run by the “Fair Education Foundation, Inc”:
All of the evidence that is required to expose and destroy the counterfeit Copernican Model of a rotating and orbiting Earth–and the entire evolutionary paradigm resting upon that counterfeit–is set out in this book (HERE) & in scores of links on this web page.
Those who read some or all of these links will quickly realize that this is no idle claim. Rather–as will become evident with each subject listed–there is abundant hard proof that both the Copernican Counterfeit and the Big Bang Evolutionary Paradigm that is built upon it are factless frauds from start to finish.
…The root definition of “science” is scire: to know. None of the components that make up the “science” of Pharisaic evolutionism is known to be true, and each component is, therefore, not “Science” by definition anymore than it is “Secular” by definition.
…Why was Kabbalist physicist Albert Einstein voted Time Magazine’s “Man of the 20th Century”?
The president of the foundation is Marshall Hall, an obscure figure who is apparently a retired high school teacher.
Meanwhile, Chisum’s admission that he’s either too stupid or too lazy not to notice whether he’s endorsing crackpot anti-semitic conspiracy theories or not risks casting a shadow over his most famous achievement, as immortalised in a famous piece by the late Molly Ivins:
…The Texas Senate had a rare moment of courage early in the [1993] session when it voted to remove homosexual sodomy from the revised version of the penal code. All were astonished.
Their vision made its way over to the House, where Chisum promptly rose and introduced an amendment to reinstate the damn thing. The Housies were afraid everyone would think they were queer if they didn’t vote for Chisum’s amendment, so they did.
Then some scholar explained to Chisum that unless he reinstated the ban on heterosexual sodomy as well, the law would be declared unconstitutional. So Chisum promptly got up and did just that.
Whereupon we had one of the more bizarre debates in the history of the Lege, with assorted avant garde members rising at the back mike to say, approximately, “Uh, Warren, uh, suppose I am in bed with my lawfully wedded spouse and I, like, kind of misaim and wind up in the wrong hole. You don’t want to send me to prison for that, do you?”
Chisum would stoutly reply, “Yes, I do. It’s against nature and The Bible.”…
A slightly different version of the story appears here.
UPDATE: From the AP:
…Bridges has denied writing the dispatch, although one of his closest political allies, Marshall Hall, said the legislator gave him the approval to draft the memo.
Hall, a 76-year-old former high school teacher whose wife ran Bridges’ election campaign, said that neither the site or the memo is anti-Semitic. “I think they tar people with that brush a little too readily,” he said…
(Hat tip: Pharyngula)
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This blog has a scan of both Chisum’s memo, and Georgia Rep. Bridges’ letter.
You state that evolution is a fact instead of theory. If you are speaking about macro evolution, the transition of one species to another, which has never been observed, how can you state it as fact? Or are you stating that evolution is a theory?
Creationism is belongs in the distant primitive past. We evolved, like every other life form, over millions of years. Darwin was an analytical man of science, whilst the biblical seven days was written by unsophisticated tribal people. As we discover more about the universe and ourselves, so we need to constantly adapt how we interpret our understanding of gnosis and Gnostic energy.
There simply is no inconsistency between Creationism and evolution. Even a strict reading of Genesis reveals that the first couple of “days” came before the sun, so, as Clarence Darrow pointed out in the Scopes Monkey Trial almost a centuray ago, the first tow days were not twenty fur hour days and could have been EONS under the strict reading. Oddly, the first few days of Genesis roughly state an accurate version (read: tribal verson) of the evoluton of life, beginning with creation of the seas and the solar system, going throgh plants and fishes and ending with Man and Woman. There are MANY Christian churches that support science and the Bible and those that don’t fail to serve the interests of mankind, grace and Good. The fight they pick with scientists, and yes, they started the fight going back to the beginnings of science, serves no useful purpose other than to congregate more followers to false Christian values.