Michael Peroutka claimed back in 2011 that the teaching of evolution is an act of disloyalty to America, Raw Story and Right Wing Watch allege. RWW links to the video where he made these remarks. Raw Story:
“American political philosophy is based on the belief that the world was created by God in six days, and that this creation event occurred about 6,000 years ago,” he explains, adding that news reports describing the Earth as millions of years old were either ignorant or “anti-American.”
“What I’m saying is that the promotion of evolution is an act of disloyalty to America… What I’m saying is there’s no way you can support or believe evolution and sing ‘God Bless America’ during the 7th inning stretch!”
Right Wing Watch:
Peroutka’s logic seems to depend on the Declaration of Independence’s statement that “all men are created equal,” which he generously “paraphrases” as, “There exists a creator God. He is the God of the Bible. He is not Allah, nor any of the Hindu deities, nor is he the God that is in the wind or in the trees or some other impersonal force. He created us. We did not evolve from apes or slimy, swampy things.”
He was the Constitution Party Candidate for President in 2004. The problem is that things are not as simple as Peroutka makes it out to be. People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Last night, I deleted a diary that turned out not to have sufficient evidence for it. It was based on a Truthdig story picked up by RT that alleged something that I wanted to hear, that former RT anchor Liz Wahl's on-air resignation was somehow staged by the Neocons. While one of the biggest promoters of her resignation story is a Neocon, the Truthdig story in question turned out to be overly dependent on anonymous sources. That should have been a red flag for me. I had a choice -- I could have created a hell of my own making by continuing to dig my heels in, or admit I was wrong and delete the diary.
This experience illustrates the danger that being overly dependent on ideology can have on someone. When people are overly wedded to ideology, whether it be pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-Euromaidan, pro-Putin, or whatever, then they see what they want to see, not the actual facts on the ground.
The more people dig their heels in when pointed out their mistakes, the more likely they are to end up like Peroutka. Even God gives people over to their own delusions, like he did with Pharoah, when he repeatedly refused to let the Israelites go even though he knew he was the right thing to do. Last time we checked, God did not tell us to check our brains at the door; he said in one Bible passage, "Come, let us reason together..."
As an example of the sort of delusions that Peroutka subscribes to, he is a member of League of the South board of directors, alleged by Raw Story and Independent Political Report, a blog covering third party movements in this country. Among the remarks attributed to the League of the South by the Southern Poverty Law Center are the following:
“Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”
— Jack Kershaw, League of the South board member, 1998
“[T]he Southern League supports a return to a political and social system based on kith and kin rather than an impersonal state wedded to the idea of the universal rights of man. At its core is a European population.”
— Michael Hill, essay on League of the South website, 2000
“If the scenario of the South (and the rest of America) being overrun by hordes of non-white immigrants does not appeal to you, then how is this disaster to be averted? By the people who oppose it rising up against their traitorous elite masters and their misanthropic rule. But to do this we must first rid ourselves of the fear of being called ‘racists’ and the other meaningless epithets they use against us. What is really meant by the [anti-racist] advocates when they peg us as ‘racists’ is that we adhere to ethnocentrism, which is a natural affection for one’s own kind. This is both healthy and Biblical. I am not ashamed to say that I prefer my own kind and my own culture. Others can have theirs; I have mine. No group can survive for long if its members do not prefer their own over others.”
— Mike Hill, Web essay
Even when people do not fall victim to such delusions, there are problems. When people are trapped in the prism of their own ideology, even one that is well within the mainstream of American political thought, there is no curiosity, no problem-solving, and no way out of the problems we face as a society today such as global warming, Ukraine, nuclear disarmament, the revival of the Cold War, healthcare, poverty, homelessness, or any of our other problems.