A cornerstone of the Bush administration's assault on science has been creationism, often disguised as intelligent design. The president's support of teaching intelligent design in the classroom has helped him maintain his base of right-wing evangelical Christian supporter in the US, even as his popularity has fallen in practically every other group due to his incompetence in dealing with Hurrican Katrina and the Iraq War.
Now in the German Free State of Thuringen, the conservative minister president Dieter Althaus (CDU) has fallen on hard times politically after the disasterous results for his party in last week's election. Bremen blogger Quirinus writes that Althaus has found a possible solution to his diminishing political fortunes: Bring the "American Style of Science" to Germany. The former math and physics teacher Althaus wants to hold a forum - "Erfurter Dialog" - on the subject of evolution and intelligent design. Not everyone is happy about this forum, as Spiegel reports:
Der Kasseler Biologieprofessor Ulrich Kutschera bezeichnete es als "Katastrophe", dass sich der CDU-Politiker Althaus derart engagiere. Auch Cornelia Pieper, die Vorsitzende des Forschungsausschusses im Bundestag, kritisierte, die Äußerungen des Ministerpräsidenten seien "nicht nachvollziehbar".
Maybe for support Althaus should invite prominent members of the American Taliban and the US pseudo-scientific community to his forum.
That's quite bizarre. Thuringia is was a Nazi Hochburg before '33, and that's why Bauhaus had to get out of Dodge, i.e., Weimar. Fritz Sauckel was Gauleiter and his Gau headquarters in Weimar is still standing as a reminder of that period. Not to mention Buchenwald.
But that's ancient history. Thuringia is overwhelmingly Protestant except for the Catholic enclave around Erfurt. There are about 200,000 Roman Catholics compared to 500,000 Lutherans. It's not exactly fertile soil for creationism, I would think.
But it's also the land where wurst was invented. If that's not evidence of intelligent design, I don't know what is.
It's hard to imagine what Althaus would be up to. You're right that his performance in the federal election was a spectacular failure. The CDU in Thuringia ran its own campaign specifically to draw voters away from the Left Party: they covered the state with posters imitating the old PDS graphics and hitting them on issue after issue. But it was all useless: the Left and the SPD surged ahead of the CDU and together collected 56 percent of the vote, while the CDU's share collapsed by 40 percent compared to its 2004 Landtag election.
Fortunately for Althaus, he's got another four years in office and a narrow (2-seat) but stable majority.
Posted by: Andy Lang | September 22, 2005 at 11:28 AM