You Just Can't Make Up Stuff This Good

Really, if someone wrote this humorous fiction, it would be immediately recognized as being too pathetically funny — and too heavy-handedly anti-Evangelical — to be plausible parody. But truth is stranger than fiction, and in this case it is more pathetically funny than fiction.

Josh Marshall tells us a richly detailed story about a message sent out under the name of a Georgia state legislator, Republican Ben Bridges that makes an astonishing claim:

Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that a so-called "secular evolution science" is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate "creation scenario" of the Pharisee Religion. This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic "holy book" Kabbala dating back at least two millennia. Evidence in the URLs below shows conclusively that "evolution science" has a very specific religious agenda and (as with "creation science") cannot legally be taught in taxpayer supported schools according to the Constitution.

The links in the message point to a Web site, Fixedearth.com, "The non-moving Earth & anti-evolution web page of The Fair Education Foundation, Inc."

Yes, that's right: in just one short hotlink we have jumped from Talking Points Memo, soberly discussing affairs of policy and foreign affairs in our nation's capitol, to deep into the wackiest heart of American darkness: the claim that the Earth rotates and that it orbits around the Sun is a lie spread by a conspiracy of Jewish physicists bent on suppressing the truth! The Web site's author supports his claim of the fixedness of the earth by posting photographs of the evidence that clearly shows, despite this obvious nonsense about the Earth rotating, the stars moving around the Earth!

If you enjoy the sport of shooting fish in a barrel with a shotgun, you could spend many happy hours tearing this Web site apart. There is a piece of me that admires the determination and dedication of the man who painstakenly collected all of this evidence and published it on the Web, in the face of all the scorn and abuse to which it has surely opened him.

The visionary behind Fixedearth.com is one Marshall Hall. Hall is married to Bonnie Hall, who is in turn the campaign manager for Georgia State Rep. Ben Bridges.

The message touting this challenge to the constitutionality of teaching evolution science in schools was sent out over Rep. Bridges' signature to a list of legislators from the states of Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

At least one of these legislators has taken an interest in the idea that Pharisee Religion is the basis of the teaching of evolution science. Texas state representative Warren Chisum, the Republican chair of the Texas state House Appropriations Committee, liked what he read, and deemed it important enough to copy the memo and distribute it to every member of the Texas state House of Representatives.

That's when the fertilizer hit the swamp cooler. The Dallas Morning News coolly reported Wednesday merely that the Fixedearth.com site contained a draft of model legislation to ban the teaching of evolution in state-supported schools. But on Thursday, after the Anti-Defamation League responded strongly to the anti-semitic content of the memo and the Web site to which it pointed, the Morning News was now saying that Chisum was "contrite" about having sent the memo. "The stuff that causes conflicts between religious beliefs, you know, I'd never be a party to that," the Morning News reports Chisum as saying. "I'm willing to apologize if I've offended anyone." The second story adds,

Mr. Chisum said he hadn't looked at the Web site and didn't realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn't vet the material more carefully.

Only after the controversy erupted did the Morning News describe Fixedearth.com as "a Web site that warns of international Jewish conspiracies."

The ADL also protested to the memo's supposed originator, Ben Bridges. Bridges, however, is not apologizing. “I regret that these people have been offended, but I didn’t offend them because I didn’t put the memo out," he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He denies having written or authorized the memo. “I did not put it out nor did I know it was going out. I’m not defending it or taking up for it.”

When asked by the Journal-Constitution reporter about the content of the memo, though, Bridges stated that he agreed with it more than he agreed with the Big Bang or with Darwin. His apology is ringing strangely hollow. Whats more, Marshall Hall insists that the memo was sent out with Bridges' approval.

Takeaways from this story that is far too stupid to be fiction:

• While Marty Peretz and AIPAC are redefining anti-semitism as opposing or criticizing the Israel hawks, real anti-semitism bubbles away in the fever swamps of the American unconscious.
• Some people, like Ben Bridges, would rather twist and evade rather than be pinned into denouncing anti-semitism.
• Even the loopiest and indefensible ideas can get traction, if people are desperate enough to believe them.

Toxic though his anti-semitism is, I nonetheless find something to admire in Marshall Hall. To put up Fixedearth.com and promote those ideas so vigorously in the face of the onslaught of ridicule he must surely receive demands immense courage of his convictions.