The Questioning Librarian

A few days ago I read with some level of interest that the anti-gay American Family Association is asking its members to refuse to either use or accept mail with the new Harvey Milk stamps, honoring this country's first openly gay elected official. The abject pettiness of this should be obvious to anyone, but I find it strangely encouraging.  This incident seems to represent the current state of the anti-gay movement in this country; having been losing every major battle for the past two years, they are reduced to bickering over stamps. A hollowed-out movement, the organized, anti-gay bigots of this country, while still strong enough to, disturbingly, block important legislation like anti-bullying because it might just encourage people to be nice to gay students, are increasingly on the defensive. They are a movement that is loud and belligerent (the faux online encyclopedia "Conservapedia", for instance, refers to Milk as a sexual predator), protesting the rise of mar...

First in the spotlight as an "Enemy of Reason" is Conservapedia, the conservative response to the "liberal untruths" of Wikipedia . They state that  "liberal bias"  isn't allowed here, and that it is not only a resource for college-bound homeschoolers, but a resource for those "seeking the truth." Well, what "truth" would that be? While I'm sure some articles are fairly good, there are a number of topics that read like they were written by creationists...likely because they were! Hence the article on  evolution , that never actually gets around to talking about the numerous strands of evidence for the theory but instead spends most of its time trying to attack it, through numerous, boundless and irrelevant attacks such as their claim that creationists win the actual debates (with a quote from the late Henry Morris, a creationist debater, voicing his opinion that they always win--hardly compelling evidence), attempting to paint e...