The Dallas Morning News reported on Valentine’s Day that Warren Chisum, Republican representative of Texas, and the second-most powerful man that state’s legislature as chairman of the state House Appropriations Committee, distributed a memorandum written by Georgia state representative Ben Bridges attacking “the evolution monopoly in the schools.” The (sadly) hyperbolic memo states that: “Indisputable evidence – long hidden but now available to everyone – demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion…This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.” The memo references a website, fixedearth.com, that contains a model bill to show what legislators can do to ban the teaching of evolution from schools as unconstitutionally respecting a “religion.”

Intrigued, I headed over to fixedearth.com to get the rest of the story. As my browser retrieved the website, the tab informed me “The Earth Is Not Movi…” I had found “The non-moving Earth & anti-evolution web page of The Fair Education Foundation, Inc. Exposing the False Science Idol of Evolutionism, and Proving the Truthfulness of the Bible from Creation to Heaven since 1973. Marshall Hall, Pres.”

“EXTRA! EXTRA!” the page alarumed. I enjoy newspapers, so that hit my sweet spot. Newspapers contain facts. Facts!

“Read all about the Copernican and Darwinian Myths (and their many ramifications going all the way to Kabbala-based Big Bangism!) IN OVER NINETY LINKS BELOW.”

Like a carnival advertisement, the page is excited, colorful, and seedy. This Mr. Hall moves in the real world, though, too: 2006 Georgia House Bill 179, a charming bit of ideological flapdoodle viewable on the site, claims, “Evidence…confirms that ‘evolution science’ is not ‘secular science’ but is, rather, derived concept for concept from an ancient ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Religion. Thus-as with rulings against ‘creation science’-this concept is also in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

Scrolling down, one finds a poem/polemic, carefully manicured to the form of a tree (or perhaps a Neolithic flint, or the Ace of Spades). It declares that the Earth is bound “in the air” by “an electromagnet and computerized sensor hidden in its display stand.” Emphasis mine.

In case you have any doubt that your cherished Pharisaical ways are precisely what are at stake, that Mr. Hall means “hidden in its display stand” and is indeed suggesting a Fixed Earth, the site challenges, “Could God have engineered something like that for the real Earth?”

Well?

“The Bible and all real evidence confirms that this is precisely what He did,” Hall writes, “and indeed: The Earth is not rotating…nor is it going around the sun.”

I searched my KJV II and found no mention of electromagnets or sensors. But the quotes are there:

“The world also is stablished that it cannot be moved.” Psalm 93:1

“He…hangeth the Earth upon nothing.” Job 26:7

Ah, of course, I was just reading it wrong. Every few lines comes a link, which inevitably leads to a sales page for a book by Marshall Hall. The books Hall writes are table leg benders, the slightest I saw some 328 pages, as if girth alone could slay the beast Reason.

In his shorter essays, exploring themes I’m sure he touches upon in his books, whoppers abound: “The self-taught, highly successful British historian, David Irving (whose Net presence deserves the ‘awesome’ label)”, for instance, comes from the essay “Historical Revisionism.” David Irving, we remember, is the British holocaust denier who was jailed in Hitler’s volkland of Austria for, well, denying the holocaust. When in Rome, da? “Revisionism” mentions, in turn, the Central Bank, “Jewish Organizations,” JFK, Woodrow Wilson, more Jews, Darwin, the New World Order, NASA and-whoops!-back to the Jews again. They just can’t catch a break sideways when it comes to guys like Marshall Hall.

Or Ben Bridges and Warren Chisum, evidently. This site comes recommended not from some crank mailing a letter to his congressman, but from congressmen. Mr. Chisum has publicly separated himself from Mr. Hall’s thunderingly dunderheaded convictions as the Anti-Defamation League has become involved-but like begets like, as the pharisaical evolutionists say.

Here, though, are two of the few remaining Republican strays that did not get run into the sea, to thalassocracy, during last November’s electoral bloodbath. If America hadn’t come to its senses to grant license to the almost equally, but differently, insidious and wrong-headed Democrats, would we be seeing this bill right now being debated in the House? Would its supporters ridicule those who “believe in” a sphere rotating in space on an orbit, quote the Bible as if to dispel all reasonable argument, demand “both sides of the issue be taught in schools?”

God, after all, commandeth. He says so here:

“Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a man, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle.” Ezekiel 1:10

There, that settles it. Are you gonna argue with GOD?!?

The other NINETY LINKS BELOW, advertised like McDonald’s sells hamburgers, lead down abysmal rabbit holes of torturous reasoning one must guess were penned exclusively by Mr. Hall, there being no other credited contributor. The ideas propounded are uniformly of at once the most peculiar and the simplest logic; skimming through, one is astonished by the sheer bulk of opinion. “There must be powerful discipline there,” one imagines. But then one realizes that it is in the service of quackery, that quackery is the very engine, that the author clings to anything that supports him like a photon shield in a meteor shower while reviling all that does not in the most vituperative terms typeable.

An interpretation takes place when religion on a rampage storms the public gate, from individual delusion to sermon to collective delusion and to action, and a political agenda is born. Through cash trap televangelists barking directives in a lather on Sunday morning public access or preachers, thumping their pulpits to tattoo their vehemence into whichever social issue they wish God to hold sway on, whichever population-liberal, libertine-they wish God to prey upon, or through smirking politicos, who’d shiv Gandhi for a glint of the limelight while propounding the Ole Time Religion, who are the true Pharisees as I understand the term, the credulous of our Diogenes nation are dazzled by these men, full of chicane and the most malign lunacies, who think the voice is God and not a missed dosage talking. The Christian Conservative Our Way or the Highway to Hell Cataract on America scatters their wits and blinds them, scares them into whatever corner is most useful. It’s not their faith in God I’m taken aback by; it is their faith in the hack-and-flackery who dare claim to deliver any divine message that raises my hackles.

We’re in a holding pattern now. The Bible Belt buffoons, the heinous low-brows clever in their stupidity, representing the religion of political revenge, have been thoroughly chastened. The crucifix is not a shield against the evils of the world but a cudgel to bludgeon good judgment with in the hands of the people who foisted the Terri Schiavo bull session passion play on us, who would have the minds of our students, dulled and complacent as they are, further muddled by the wall of bunkum the fundamentalists have erected to repel the tide of science and reason and save the last vestiges of the conception of God that justifies their views alone.