Anyone catch that woman using her son to ask Rick Perry questions on how old the Earth is? If you think that  people like her (or Charles Johnson ) really care about science you are mistaken. To them science (including the whole global warming debate) is a tool in order to push their social and political agenda which includes transfer of funds from the wealthier nations to the poorer ones and  more government control and regulations. By nature, most liberals tend to shy away from math and the hard natural sciences in college because in those courses you cannot talk your way out of an answer. The answers in geometry or chemistry are either right or wrong, liberals prefer courses in which they can manipulate words and which are all about “feelings”. Liberals are never the ones who lead the way out onto the ball field, showed you how to take apart the engine on your car or use their fists in the schoolyard on  obnoxious, abusive  bullies, they prefer to write essays on what they felt like when their goldfish dies or what they did on their summer vacation. That is why so many of them go into the arts and journalism.

by Kevin D. Williamson

Gov. Rick Perry, pressed for his views on evolution, characterized it as “a theory” with “some gaps” in it. He went on to say that, in Texas, both conventional evolution and creationism are taught. He told a boy whose mother asked him about the subject: “In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools — because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”

This is the sort of thing that drives a certain kind of person nuts. Likewise, Perry’s joking about secession after being asked a question about it — and explaining that “when we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic . . . and one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want” — has caught on as a kind of shorthand for all of the cultural friction that is going to make Perry a tough sell to suburban moderates.

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The broader question, however, is: Why would anybody ask a politician about his views on a scientific question? Nobody ever asks what Sarah Palin thinks about dark matter, or what John Boehner thinks about quantum entanglement. (For that matter, I’ve never heard Keith Ellison pressed for his views on evolution.) There are lots of good reasons not to wonder what Rick Perry thinks about scientific questions, foremost amongst them that there are probably fewer than 10,000 people in the United States whose views on disputed questions regarding evolution are worth consulting, and they are not politicians; they are scientists. In reality, of course, the progressive types who want to know politicians’ views on evolution are not asking a scientific question; they are asking a religious and political question, demanding a profession of faith in a particular materialist-secularist worldview.

Take the question of global warming: Jon Huntsman was quick to declare his faith in the scientific consensus on global warming, and Rick Perry has been openly skeptical of it. Again keeping in mind that nobody really ought to care what either Huntsman or Perry thinks about the relevant science, both are making an error, and a grave one, in conceding that the question at hand is scientific at all. It is not; it is political. One might be convinced that anthropogenic global warming is a real and problematic phenomenon, and still not be convinced that the policies being pushed by Al Gore et al. are wise and intelligent. (Some more thoughts on that here.)

Progressives like to cloak their policy preferences in the mantle of science, but they do not in fact give a fig about science, which for them is only a vehicle to be ridden to the precise extent that it is convenient. This is why they will ask what makes Rick Perry qualified to disagree with the scientific establishment, but never ask the equally relevant question of what makes Jon Huntsman qualified to agree with it. So long as they are getting the policies they want, they don’t care. If you want to see how dedicated a progressive is to dispassionate science, spend two minutes talking about the heritability of intelligence. You’ll be up to your neck in witchcraft and superstition and evasion in no time at all. (If you want to test a progressive’s faith in rigorous scholarship more broadly, ask him about gains from trade and comparative advantage, realities that are as solid as anything social science has to offer.)

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Read the rest – Rick Perry pushes their buttons