Bobby Jindal, Stupidity and Creationism

Joanna Weiss has a column in the Boston Globe about Bobby Jindal and his recent comments on the stupidity of the Republican Party (no disagreement here). The article is really more about Zack Kopplin than it is about Jindal but that is her lead-in. She writes:

The first time Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said that the GOP needed to “stop being the stupid party” — in an interview with Politico last fall, a few days after the presidential election — I got an e-mail from Zack Kopplin.

I had just written that Jindal was an intriguing potential face of the GOP: young, smart, Indian-American, with Southern roots and a background in health care wonkery. Kopplin, a 19-year-old college student from Baton Rouge, wanted to remind me that Jindal had signed the Louisiana Science Education Act, the Orwellian-named law that permits creationism to be taught in Louisiana public schools.

Jindal is sort of between a rock and a hard place. He has made a name for himself by declaring what is fast becoming self-evident—that the Republican party is losing touch with its base and implementing policies that are self-serving rather than people-serving—and gained some of the national spotlight as a result. The catch is that he is also on record as having signed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which has been pilloried as being anti-science and has already led to flirtations with creationism that have made the news and probably countless cases that have not. It was only when a close study was done on neighboring Texas that it was revealed that numerous school districts were teaching creationism as science. Gov. Jindal cannot have it both ways. If he wants the Republican party to be more intelligent, it must divorce itself from laws such as these.