Why, indeed?

I'm sure you've all heard about the hapless (to be kind) Warren Chisuman (R), House Appropriations Committee Chairman in the Texas state House, who sent out a fairly outragous memo which

pointed fellow state legislators to the information at fixedearth.com which rails against the “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism” and claims that “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.” They've even caught on to the "centuries-old conspiracy" on the part of Jewish physicists to destroy Christianity.

(see Talking Points Memo for the whole story)

He got the memo from a zealous Georgia legislator - Georgia State House Rep. Ben Bridges (R), chairman of the retirement committee in the state house. Chisuman is now saying that, well, he didn't ever actually go to the website he was commending to his fellows' attention, which is pretty sad and would, I'd think, make any other memos he sends out immediately suspect. But he was only forwarding the stuff; Bridges sent it out.

Or did he???? (dun dun dun!)

His office certainly did. At the moment, Bridges is trying to deny that he sent out the original memo in the first place (blaming it on his campaign manager), but, as TPM puts it,

the views expressed in his memo are just too compelling for Bridges to deny outright.

Asked if he agreed with the Kaballah evolution conspiracy theory and the earth's lack of motion, he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory. I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?”

You rarely hear it put quite so bluntly. (By the way, I love the "Darwin Theory" bit. Does he call gravity "the Newton Theory", I wonder? I'm sure he refers to "the Copernicus (or possibly Galileo) Theory", considering his championing the fixed earth.) But yes, why teach anything?

Why indeed teach anything rather than risk teaching "a lie"?

Let the kids grow up pig-ignorant. We can import anything we need scientific or technology related from some country where they'd rather take risks, can't we? Russia, or China, perhaps, or godless Europe. We can just sit here in our beloved darkness.