Like the evolution stickers he was writing about, Brian Schmalzbach's column ("Liberals in Cobb County," Feb. 15) was a violation of liberal tenets.
By calling evolution a theory, not fact, the stickers predispose the reader to view evolution as a revolutionary idea, and one with faulty foundations at that.
When you read a warning label stuck on a bottle of prescription medicine, you tend to look at the drugs with a sort of skepticism. We automatically respond like Pavlov's dogs to such "warning labels."
The Cobb County legislators played on such instincts. This is not some "little school board" in Georgia bearing innocent wishes and ripe peaches. They are counting on people like Schmalzbach to pay much more attention to the liberal air of the surrounding text. They trust that such liberals will commend the idea that material "should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." And they believe those kinds of liberals will overlook the proselytizing undertone of the sticker, which attempts to promote creationism as the most viable alternative to evolution.
Couldn't creationism itself be considered a theory? In Schmalzbach's piece, he portrayed God as an important part of explaining the world, thereby endorsing religious faith. However, not all religions agree about how the world began. Each religion has its own version, starting at different stages of evolution with different creatures and different stories.
If creationism does not have a universal basis, let alone scientific proof, why doesn't Cobb County also add a sticker that says "Creationism is a theory, not a fact"? Why only call attention to evolution, something which does have scientific proof to back it up?
The sticker indicates the sad state of affairs the Cobb County School System seems to be in now. Schools are places of education, where all material should theoretically be approached with an open mind and critically considered. That's not a liberal idea; that's getting an education. If Cobb County feels the need to add a sticker saying so, that's an indication of a system in trouble - a system that is not challenging its participants to think, and is rather encouraging them to simply accept information.
The sticker is a desperate attempt to devalue the theory of evolution under the guise of critical, open-minded thinking.
The only dead dogma that John Stuart Mill would notice is how easily "liberal" rhetoric is accepted with little or no challenge to the connotations behind it.
Srividya Kalyanaraman '08 challenges everything.
