It is fun, and appropriate, to slam local newspapers that uncritically regurgitate yahooistic creationist rhetoric. But when the local papers display fits of rational thinking, we should praise them.
Thus, I bring you a quote from the St. Petersburg times. This is from their list of Top Ten People to Watch in 2008, and it concerns recent and ongoing political events in Florida:
4. Charles Darwin
Despite 148 years of uninterrupted scientific validation, Darwin and his seminal work, The Origin of Species, continue to lose ground to the Judeo-Christian creation story.
Just this month, a majority of the Pinellas School Board said they thought it would be good to balance the teaching of evolution with creationism, which one of them said "can explain some of the gaps and holes in the theory of evolution."
Just how an untestable assertion that the world was made in six days could explain these unspecified inadequacies is left unclear.
C/mon now, you know that assertion has been tested. And it failed.
Ed Darrell at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub has been keeping score of the editorials in Texas in regards to the TEA issue. The Houston Post and the Waco Times have fared well, while the Dallas Morning News (to which I once subscribed) and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram fared less well.
Comment: "THANK YOU for getting it right on Charles Darwin. He has been consistently supported by multiple fields of scientific research only to have creationists continue to lie about him."
It went to moderation. Hope they get a lot of positive comments. Florida is Bush country, after all.
This is not really surprising from the St. Petersburg Times. It's a very unusual newspaper for any location; it's a non-profit paper run by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynter_Institute