Michael Mayo, The Sun Sentinel

March 20, 2008

Michael Mayo

The Sun-Sentinel

200 East Las Olas Boulevard

Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33301

RE: “Academic Freedom” & “Mumbo Jumbo” – A somewhat different take on your world weary column about those dolts who do not sacrifice at the altar to the great God Darwin.

Mr. Mayo,

Whenever I see the “Academic Freedom” and, forgive me, buzz words such as “mumbo jumbo” I reach for my copy of “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich.

Can you believe it was only 40 years ago that this Ph.D. charlatan, a man who was a regular on that great cauldron of ideas, the Johnny Carson Show, told us that we would either freeze to death or starve to death before the year 2000. Maybe it was starve and then freeze. Either way it is 2008 and I am calorically challenged plus I have the A/C on.

By the way I know why Oedipus went to Colonnus. I can explain, probably even to you, the Rule of 78. I am conversant with the 4 source theory of Pentateuch Composition. I know how to attack a 2 deep zone. And the last time I handled a snake was when I danced with a lithe, mush brained modern American Liberal lady.

The problem with academic freedom is that it is or it isn’t. You pick your head up from the microscope and say it is cancer or it isn’t. No maybes.

You say that “if it’s OK for science teachers to discuss the holes in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, it should be OK for health teachers to discuss the shortcomings with ‘abstinence only’…”

You are correct. What you just used was a Rhetorical device called tu quoque. That’s from the Trivium.

Since we’re stretching the boundaries of Academic Freedom let’s include the following.

#1 – It was a commonly accepted fact that tomatoes were toxic. If you were a botanist and you didn’t kneel at that altar you were shunned a la the skeptics of Global Warming and its high priest, the former Vice President, Alpha Gump.

#2 – The Department of Social Sciences should examine how the racial views of Margaret Sanger became the basis for Hitler’s Nuremberg Race Laws. She advocated unlimited abortion as a means of culling the herd of “undesirables”. She championed euthanasia as a way to dispose of less than perfect human beings. It didn’t take a giant step to get from there to Auschwitz, did it? You probably knew that, right?

#3 – The Department of Can’t We All Just Get Along should investigate why Black women who make up about 6% of the population account for 35% of the abortions in this country since 1973. Is this genocide? Watch out when Pastor Wright finds out about this. Boy oh boy but will he be mad.

#4 – Here’s one for the Math Department and the Department of Philosophy. The population of Broward County went down last year. The Broward County school population has been going down for 4 years. The budgets of neither entity, said budgets being those of the Broward County Board of Education and of Broward County, have gone down. If you have fewer people to serve would not Logic dictate that at the very worst case scenario the budget would be flat, would be even? How can it go up? Can we infer that Logic never enters into discussions concerning public budgets?

I even know the difference between Chiaroscuro and Caravaggio.

I know that we went from a universal knowledge of physics to turning Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the world’s largest stir fry pit in about 41 months. Maybe somebody can tell me why the Theory of Evolution is still called the Theory of Evolution. It’s been 154 years since it was first posited. We flew to the moon, walked around for a few days, picked up some souvenirs, and then came home. That took, start to finish, from idle thought to done deed, a bit more than 8 years. It’s about time for the secular humanists among us to step up to the plate and hit it out of the park. Think Newton. Think Einstein. Think of the joy of shutting up all those red necked huckleberries. 154 years. It’s time to hit the passing gear. A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

From the Scientific Method methodology it is not my job to disprove it. It is someone else’s job to prove it. Maybe it’s time to get’er done.

If it is so obvious that we can’t even discuss the possibility that just maybe it ain’t necessarily so why can’t somebody just prove it? I am not a big fan of Intelligent Design when we get down to the design of the knee. On the other hand I don’t like being told that I am descended from apes. Bears, maybe. Apes, never.

How’s that for mumbo jumbo?