Charles Does Indeed Blow

Outside of universities, the other notable place with a shocking lack of ideological and cultural diversity is major media newsrooms.  While most newsrooms have the requisite numbers of women, minorities, and gays (nearly all of them liberal conformists), you will seldom find an evangelical Christian or an orthodox Jew.

Hence you find New York Times columnist Charles Blow reflecting today that not only are lots of Americans Christians, but they actually believe in God, and moreover, believe their revealed scriptures contain truth.  This Blow finds a “constriction.”  He is  “shocked.”

I am both shocked and fascinated by Americans’ religious literalism.

One Gallup report issued last week found that 42 percent of Americans believe “God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.”

Even among people who said that they were “very familiar” with the theory of evolution, a third still believed that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.

A little further down he get to his point:

How does America remain a world leader in an increasingly technological, science-based world, when so many of our citizens — and even our leaders, including Republicans who might run for president — deny basic science?

Here it must he remarked that a belief in a literal six-day creation harms no one.  Who cares.  So what.  But the belief, popular with many prominent liberals like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that vaccines cause autism and other diseases despite piles of “settled science” to the contrary, has real consequences when people act on it—which too many gullible parents have.  Has Charles Blow written a column calling out this dangerous anti-scientific belief?  I can’t find one if he did.  (Maybe someone else will have better luck trolling Google.)

Isaac Chotiner of The New Republic calls Blow “The Worst New York Times Columnist,” but with the keen competition from Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman, that’s like being the tallest building in Wichita.  But he certainly does blow.

Incidentally, Blow recalls Mike Huckabee answering a question about creation versus evolution in the 2008 presidential campaign.  Worth taking in Huckabee’s answer.  I’m not a Huckabee fan especially, but I think he’s quite good here:

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