Seems that when Republicans know they have no valid rationale for their actions, they decide to just make up their own facts and use them to justify their stupidity.
That’s exactly what happened recently in Louisiana, where the state legislature was debating a repeal of the?Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), a 2008 law which gives teachers the right to introduce creationism and other unscientific theories into state classrooms.
During the debate, GOP?Senator Elbert Guillory rose to speak and let loose with a version of history that appears in no history book except the one which resides in his fevered, misinformed mind. Guillory said:
?There was a time, sir, when scientists thought that the world was flat. And if you get to the end of it, you’d fall off. There was another time when scientists thought that the sun revolved around the world. And they always thought to ensure that anyone who disagreed with their science was a heretic. People were burned for not believing that the world was flat. People were really badly treated.”
Seems that Senator Guillory’s version of history has a small problem: Yes, people have been burned at the stake for beliefs contrary to the accepted norm of the time, but they were charged, tried, and executed not by scientists, but by religious authorities, most notably the Catholic Church, which, it should be noted, wrongly killed thousands during the Inquisition.
Thankfully, there were some rational voices in the Louisiana Senate that day who were adept at detecting lies and challenging the bizarre assertions of Senator Guillory. Most notable was?Senator Jean-Paul J. Morrell, who told his fellow lawmakers:
“When you look at history, oftentimes, when science pushes the envelope, the leading person to lock that person up is oftentimes religious leaders. And at the end of the day, I think when you talk about a fair exchange of ideas, as long as those ideas are based in fact, I think you really don’t have a problem. At the end of the day, we want to have a logical discourse about things that are provable.”
This is not the first time Senator Guillory has brought up other odd defenses for keeping the LSEA. Just a couple of years ago, he claimed?that repealing the LSEA would mean that the teachings of a witch doctor he had met would be off-limits as an opposing view of how the world was created. In that debate, Guillory alleged, the witch doctor:
?Wore no shoes, was semi-clothed, [and] used a lot of bones that he threw around.”
Something tells me the only bones being thrown are the ones clanking around in Senator Guillory’s empty skull.
