I suggest as a hypothesis that the presence of a stronger tradition of organized labor and left-wing politics is inversely related to the presence of a fervor for creationism. Perhaps creationism is a price we pay for the sins of the failure to organize the South and racism.
>These last few years Kansas fundamentalists have been forbidden to teach
>religion classes openly in their public schools; should they do so
>anyway, they risk being sued by the ACLU, Barry Lynn's "Americans United
>for Separation of Church and State," and similar groups. But with this
>new anti-evolution regulation, they can now sneak their religion classes
>in the back door of the biology department.
Not just biology but also geology, chemistry, and physics must become distorted through the introduction of creationism.
We may advocate the teaching of comparative religion (of which Christianity should be only a part) in public schools, which should also include a study of the history of philosophy, as well as the history of racist and sexist misuse of science. Should be quite interesting, though I am not sure how many public school teachers are up to such a demanding task. Alternatively, a course in the study of Biblical scholarship and its vicissitude may be taught as part of English or history. I didn't come to the USA until I entered grad school, so I don't know if the above is already part of public school education somewhere.
However, I don't think that such a way of including religion in public education would appease fundamentalists, who do not think of their Book as just a piece of literature or historical document.
Yoshie