Billy Townsend, The Tampa Tribune, December 22, 2007
LAKELAND – Public floggings hurt, even when administered by satirical sacred noodles.
Ask the Polk County School Board. The panel made news last month when five of its seven members declared a personal belief in the concept of intelligent design, the religiously based explanation of the development of life believed in by many Christians.
Four of those five sympathetic board members said they would like to see intelligent design taught in Polk schools as an alternative to Darwinian evolution, at a time when new state standards mentioning evolution by name for the first time are under consideration.
Just like that, it appeared the Darwin wars had found their newest battlefield.
Yet a few weeks later, the controversy is dying with a whimper. There’s no board support for a challenge to the proposed standards. Some of the five school board members blame the local newspaper for trying to start a fight.
The Tattlesnake — CNN Through the Ages Edition
What if the cable news channel had been around earlier in history?
The Roman Empire, circa 33 A.D.:
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, I’m Wolfus Blitzus and this is CNN! Breaking news in Judea, where our army has tried and executed a Jewish religious zealot who challenged the authority of our forces of liberation there.”
WB: “We’ll take you now to Candius Crolius, embedded with our troops in Jerusalem…”
CC: “Wolfus, I am standing near a hill outside of Judea’s capital city, where a dangerous terrorist has just been executed and a palpable sigh of relief has gone up among our peacekeeping forces here. This man, Yeshua bar Joseph, was a threat to peace and order that a crowd of his countrymen released a convicted murderer rather than let him go free.”
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