Buttars’ brand of ‘design’ flawed
 
Letters to the Editor
The Herald Journal - Logan, Utah
 
To the editor:

Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, recently announced his plans to fight for instruction of "divine design" in Utah public schools.

I appreciate Mr. Buttars upholding moral standards. I too have standards I think are important to be upheld for the good of the community. When we present religious doctrine, which has no propositions that can be scientifically tested, as the equivalent of a scientific theory, we are undermining scientific standards. We are undermining our competence as citizens within a complex technological society.

Here we are living in a society that is using these principles of evolution to engineer the very food we eat. How can we undermine these principles within education and then expect these students to become citizens capable of responsibly managing the technologies based on these principles?

Also, the substitution of religious doctrine in place of education endangers democracy. We needn’t travel to the Middle East to find examples of this. The words "lost boys" have been surfacing within Utah more and more these days, referring to the surplus excommunicated boys cast off from Utah’s large and rapidly growing polygamous cults, the largest being the FLDS. Its current prophet, Warren Jeffs, too is gaining notoriety as a fugitive from charges of sexual molestation of young boys, presiding over marriages of minor girls and for embezzlement of FLDS "United Effort Plan" funds.

The FLDS communities are polygamous, which has presented them with a problem: surplus boys. The FLDS solution: many boys are excommunicated under flimsy charges of being flirtatious or disrespectful of their elders. The boys are then told that they are unworthy, are banished from their communities and families, and then are dumped into the care of the “gentile” world.

The FLDS communities have become increasingly fanatic through a process of substituting religious indoctrination in place of education. The better educated and less susceptible to mind control members of the polygamous communities have tended to leave or have been excommunicated, so that the concentration of fanatics has increased over time. Fanatics in turn further dismantled education so that the next generation was even more steeped in ignorance and mind control.

Through this process of distillation, ordinary people became fanatics. We Utahns didn’t notice this process until we were shocked into noticing it. Most communities don’t dump large numbers of their unwanted children on others’ doorsteps. This gets our attention. A fanatic like Warren Jeffs doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. America would do well to take a good look at how this has worked here in Utah’s polygamous sects before it opts to go down this road.

Mr. Buttars would have us choose between scientific standards and moral standards. We can have both. What Mr. Buttars would deliver is neither.

Charles Ashurst

Logan
 
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Originally published November 24, 2005
 
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