Apologies for the week of silence - I've moved into a new house and moving sucked up a lot more of the past week than I had anticipated. But hey, it's not like I took five weeks of vacation in Crawford, Texas. Though I must say, if I were to take five weeks of vacation, I'm sure I could think of some place more interesting to go than Crawford, Texas. I'd at least pick somewhere with better weather in August.
Anyway, you go away for a week and so much happens. I'll try to catch up. I wonder how the President does it?
Speaking of the President, I'm sure you've heard that President Bush has endorsed the teaching of religion gussied up as pseudo-legit sciency-type stuff in our nation's high school classrooms. The evangelicals in Kansas should go nuts over this. If you are not already apoplectic enough just because of the whole religion-in-the-science-classrooms angle, here's why your blood pressure should go up more, if you care about women in science.
The ID/creationist folks do not want to derail or undo science, as some of their critics might suggest. No, science is too powerful and profitable for that. Rather, the enemies of science as we currently know it seek to control science, in order to pervert it and bend it to their own purposes. These purposes are to oppose the forces of materialism, which they see as dominating our society, and to instill a focus on intelligent design throughout "religious, moral, cultural and political life" (see earlier post on "What's Wrong With Kansas?"). Thus, the question is not "Would a creationist's plane fly?" but "Where will the creationists be flying their planes to - and who gets to ride?"
In the design theory permeation of cultural and moral life, there is a special plan for women. Namely, that they stay at home, raise and homeschool the children, and tend to the needs of the men. (Insert here the usual disclaimer about how motherhood/homemaking is a noble calling, yada yada, just shouldn't be coerced, etc to avoid cranky comments about noble motherhood. As for the needs of men - they should do more tending to themselves.) The Intelligent Design movement is a very serious problem for anyone who cares about increasing the number of women in science and engineering. Even if the Design Police might occacionally consider having a career or just working for awhile acceptable for women in certain circumstances, the gender transgression involved doing science and engineering would be unacceptable. I'll expand on this in later posts. But for now, just go take another look at that New Yorker article about Patrick Henry College, and pay particular attention to the conflict Elisa Muench is experiencing:
...the expectation of most of the guys she knows at Patrick Henry—that wives should just “fade out,” that she should instantly take on the identity of a wife and mother “and consider it a blessing”—is not something that she’s comfortable with. “I just think there’s more that God called me to do, and that’s a hard thing to say around here,” ...
10:47:07 PM 
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