Kyle Cupp
Adam Gopnik defends the increasingly popular practice of asking politicians whether or not they accept evolution:
What the question means, and why it matters, is plain: Do you have the courage to embrace an inarguable and obvious truth when it might cost you something to do so? A politician who fails this test is not high-minded or neutral; he or she is just craven, and shouldn’t be trusted with power. This catechism’s purpose—perhaps unfair in its form, but essential in its signal—is to ask, Do you stand with reason and evidence sufficiently to anger people among your allies who don’t?
This defense might have merit if there weren’t a million betters ways to determine whether a politician should be trusted with power–ways that actually pertain to the exercise and consequences of that power. I don’t care whether Scott Walker is willing to risk offending his political allies, not when he supports anti-labor legislation. I couldn’t care less what Jeb Bush has to say about “intelligent design” when he advances an interventionist foreign policy that has killed over a hundred thousand people, displaced millions, and made the world less secure. I can’t begin to care, as Hemant Mehta apparently does, that high profile Republicans are embarrassing us in front of other countries. Really, we’re worried that other countries might be laughing at us?
Asking politicians about evolution can in some occasions be appropriate–if, for example, they have a say over whether the subject is taught in the classroom, but all the attention being given to Walker and other presidential hopefuls over what they have to say about evolution isn’t going to diminish their chances at winning office or help advance sound policy. It’s largely a distraction from the ideas of theirs that actually matter, more so when the attention takes the form of ridicule. We get our guffaws, but not much else. To have its place, ridicule has to accomplish more than making the privileged feel good about themselves.
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