Vote Against 'Extremist Thinking' Candidates

I have lived in the Stevenson High School district for over 10 years and look forward to my now 7th and 4th grade children being able to attend one of the best high schools in Illinois, if not the nation. I find it ironic that the new ‘125’ school board candidates are in part running on a platform of less taxation. It’s hard to argue against lower taxes, or motherhood or apple pie for that matter. However, these particular candidates are not only vague on how they plan to lower our tax bills, but they are also vague about exactly who they are, what they believe and what they wish to promote.

Their own web site (http://vote125for125.org) does have some ‘red flags.' With regard to the curriculum (the most important issue for me), they state that they “seek a common ground approach that exposes students to both the strengths and weaknesses of neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories.” This specific wording has been used as ‘code language’ for over 20 years as a back door method to get creationism taught in public school science classses, so much so that the phrase itself has its own Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strengths_and_weaknesses_of_evolution).

While evolution is indeed a theory, it's a scientific one, just like relativity, gravity and quantum mechanics. Whatever your theological beliefs, creationism has no business being taught as science in public schools, and it’s against the Constitution to do so. Furthermore, two of the three candidates belong to a church whose own web site (http://www.hbclz.org) proudly quotes from past sermons on creationism, including frankly incendiary comments like "Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution”. To assume that teaching creationism in science is not part of their agenda would be foolish. And just imagine what would happen to your property taxes if a school board with this ideology was successful. The legal fees involved in defending the inevitable lawsuit would dwarf all other taxation concerns.

I encourage everyone to go to the polls on April 5 and vote against this kind of extremist thinking. Our children will be much better served by the candidacies of Moons, Lubin, Roberts and Weisberg (http://www.united4stevenson.org).

Carl Kalbhen, MD

Long Grove