The Right Wing conservatives love to consider themselves as leading a "revolution" of "ideas," as they push their medieval agenda, and chide progressives for "having no ideas of their own."
This can only be true if you accept the most fundamentalist or reactionary of world-views and reject the knowledge and scholarship of the last few centuries. Rather than being a "party of ideas" as Republicans claim, they want to roll back the clock to a time when only the rich white men and the state-approved clergy completely controlled all aspects of society. And anything that fails to support their absolute control is to be rejected on faith alone, with no actual discussion of the evidence otherwise.
See the proof after the flip:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/12/INGR1D61VC1.DTL
Human Events, a conservative weekly, recently convened a panel of 15 conservative scholars to formulate a list of the most dangerous books of the past two centuries.
"Dangerous books"? Does anyone else catch a whiff of Nazi Germany circa 1933 in this statement?
And like Nazi Germany, that rejected psychology and quantum physics on the grounds that they were "Jewish," so our own contemporary fascists want to reject anything that smacks of "reality-based" humanistic study: anthropology, philosophy, education, environmental science, sexual biology, engineering and so on. One might understand their questioning political writings, but to blatantly reject empirical science supported by decades of research? They're completely delusional!
Betty Friedan did make the conservative's top 10, scoring in seventh place with her book "The Feminine Mystique," coming in two slots behind John Dewey and his subversive and dangerously humanistic tome "Democracy and Education." Dewey's book was one slot less dangerous than The Kinsey Report, the 1948 study of American sexuality by Alfred Kinsey.
Conservatives also hated "Coming of Age in Samoa," Margaret Mead's groundbreaking work in anthropology; "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich's book on runaway population growth, and "On Liberty," John Stuart Mill's 19th century philosophical treatise.
"Silent Spring," Rachel Carson's pioneering work on the dangers of pesticides, earned conservative ire, as did Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed, " the book that alerted American consumers to death traps built into some of the cars they were being sold.
Rather than study the actual beautiful and complex world in which we live and understand it for what it is, if the book doesn't fit their archaic world-view, it is dangerous, suspect and to be rejected. How can one discuss or argue anything with minds so closed?
They control the mainstream media and now they are coming for the basis of the remaining shreds of intellectual integrity. Any person who doesn't wish their children to grow up in a fascist theocracy should be outraged, and reject this attempt to brand ideas themselves as "dangerous."
That a conservative movement magazine with intellectual pretensions would even publish a list of "dangerous books," reveals these knuckle-dragging throwbacks for what they are: anti-intellectual, anti-free speech, anti-reason, and anti-human.