Bill Nye Wants Your Child
Bill Nye has a problem with Intelligent Design (ID) believers. He said so in a recent YouTube video. Most of what he says is benign scientific worship, but there’s a moment in the video that gave me pause. In the video, around ~1:47 Bill Nye attempts to level with religious adults. He allows them to have their inconsistent beliefs but he asks them to not pass them onto their kids. The words he used, which I find deeply disturbing, are “We need them.”
The “We” in his sentence turns out to be The American Taxpayer, and The American Government, both of whom “need” our children to turn out a certain way. Bill imagines that it’s difficult for children to turn out this way when a parent teaches the child that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
I owe Bill Nye a debt for this video. Thank you. You boiled my problem with liberal government down to just three words – “We need them.” My response is also a three word sentence - “They’re not yours!”
That’s what liberals fail to understand. That’s why Bill feels the way he feels. That’s why we keep having arguments about charter schools that teach bible “science.” Because the liberals seem to think that parents are only as good as they are liberal, and teaching your children something “wrong” means you are hurting the entire nation.
Here’s the thing: our children are not America’s children – they are the children of Individual Americans. The government may monitor them, judge them, rate, categorize them, send them to war, pass laws to govern them and it may even restrict their rights. But it may not raise them any more than it may determine what their religious beliefs will be.
That is the parent’s job and if the parent wants to transmit their crazy world view to the child then it is their right to do that – what else is freedom, if it isn’t the right to raise your child as you see fit? The parent has a valid right to believe as he believes and a duty to transmit to their child the beliefs which will serve them well in life. If you don’t think that ID is a belief that serves people well then I have none other than evolution itself to point at and say “Scoreboard!” The individual lived long enough to procreate, found someone to procreate with, and made a new generation – clearly ID does not interfere with evolution.
Bill continues, saying something along the lines of “These ideas won’t exist in a few hundred years” and he’s right in a small sense but wrong in a grander sense – those ideas will be replaced by something the Bill Nye’s of the future find equally repugnant. So long as parents still have the right to actually be parents, some will teach their children ideas others dislike and think are “wrong.” This is part of the human condition. Before we worshipped science we worshiped a god-appointed king and there was a Bill Nye back then saying “You know who’s making things harder for us? These darned people who want freedom! When are we going to take force parents to raise their kids right?!”
If you don’t like the way I raise my kid – raise your own differently. I am not religious and won’t be teaching my daughter ID. I will, however, be teaching her ideas that many are against and find repugnant. Example: I will teach her Social Darwinism in a positive way because I think it is a valid idea. Poverty is not a social ill –it’s what happens when you can make children you have no chance of caring for and the state will provide for them. I’ll teach her that well-meaning liberals are the new boogeyman, buying votes with the wealth produced by the best in our society and then giving it to the worst. She’ll know that her father believes that some people are more fit than others, and that she comes from good genetic stock – the kind meant for leadership.
Are my beliefs next on the chopping block, Bill? Is my parenting hurting the “we” you speak of? Would you like to take away my right to teach my daughter these things because they run counter to your own beliefs? Are your beliefs somehow Objective Truths while mine are just simple, stupid, beliefs? I dislike ID very much and my choice is to not teach it to my child. But I believe that to support ID’s destruction is to support the destruction of individual identity in place of national, or scientific, identity. I am a man long before I am a citizen, Bill, and my daughter will be my daughter regardless of what nation we live in.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
R
Con Chapman, I'm going to go get a copy of that book from Amazon now. Sounds intriguing. I appreciate you pointing it out.