With denouncers piling on in Polk County, someone needs to recognize the rare courage of school board members Kay Fields, Tim Harris, Margaret Lofton and Hazel Sellers for taking a stand in the face of withering rationalist and scientific criticism.

For their bold vision in saying they reject a proposed science curriculum that teaches evolution as a unifying and broadly accepted theory, and instead advocating one that gives intelligent design equal weight in textbooks, classrooms and hungry young minds, I nominate Fields-Harris-Lofton-Sellers for Science Educators Of The Year.

The year 1633, to be precise.

Surely people as profoundly knowledgeable as Fields-Harris-Lofton-Sellers can tell you that 1633 was the year Galileo went on trial for heresy. Had Fie-Har-Lof-Sel been on the heresy panel, they’d have voted to censure and excommunicate Galileo for his shocking support of heliocentrism—the mad idea that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around.

“If [evolution] is taught,” Lofton told The Ledger, while putting the finishing touches on her proposal to have a moat dug around Polk County, “I want to balance it with the fact that we may live in a universe created by a supreme being as well.” Asked to expound scientifically upon who, what, where or how this supreme being might be, based on her interpretation of the vague, contorted and disputed evidence of intelligent design, and recognizing that the Supreme Court has called such religion-based concepts unconstitutional, Lofton began to hum and pressed a Bible against each ear.

Harris was no less shrewd. “My tendency would be to have both sides shared with students since neither side can be proven,” he said as he tried to wind his sundial. He did not expand on why, under any circumstances, presumably unproven and unprovable “sides” should be “shared” in a science curriculum. Nor did he address the vast storehouse of evidence supporting evolution as the essential engine of life on Earth or explain how so many biologists, physicists, chemists, doctors, geologists, astronomers, botanists, morphologists—many of them Nobel Prize laureates—and the genes of all of Earth’s species, plant and animal, have so easily been duped.

Fields and Sellers, meanwhile, were in a heated argument about how many leeches to use to treat a paper cut.

Meanwhile, the piping hot debate came with a side dish of pasta.

Adding sauce to the discussion was a story that ran Nov. 17 in The Ledger on an alternative theory—science al dente—noodling for a place in the curriculum: that of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The gist of the FSM is simple and compelling. There is no more scientific basis for intelligent design—creationism in sheep’s clothing—than there is for the concept that an omniscient, undetectable creature made of pasta created the universe. If intelligent design supporters can demand equal time in science classes, why can’t anybody with a pseudo-scientific belief?

“I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world: one-third time for intelligent design, one-third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism and one-third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence,” Henderson is quoted in the article.

Undaunted, Fi-Ha-Lo-Se have unveiled their 2008 plan for Polk County schools:

* All globes used in geography classrooms will be designed by Flat Earthers.

* All numerical distances in math problems will be converted into cubits. Also, the new value of pi is 3.

* Medicine will be banished, saving thousands of dollars. School nurses will heal sick or injured students with a laying on of hands after making a diagnosis based on the students’ auras. In emergencies, bleeding may be used.

* All cheerleaders must be Virgos.

* During the Pledge of Allegiance, the phrase “under God” will be replaced with “under the intelligent designer.”

* Newest weapon in campus security: catapults.

* Hall monitors will take on the additional duty of pushing large carts through hallways while ringing a bell and intoning, “Bring out your dead.”

* Bonfires lit to celebrate football victories also will be used to burn undesireable books and, when necessary, witches—mainly smart students who question the validity of intelligent design.

Hats, and heads, off to F-H-L-S. They are the answer to Polk students’ academic underachieving. They are the meatballs to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. When they say there’s no way they’ve evolved, it’s easy to believe them.

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