At the end of the last century few clerics opposed the idea of evolution. A Day of Creation might be millions of years long, or might represent six real days that marked the origin of a spiritual Man after the long ages it took all else to evolve. Real bigotry had to wait for modern times. The creationist movement is part of a triumphal New Ignorance that rules in many places, the United States more than most. In fact, the majority of those determined to tell lies to children believe in Darwin's theory and understand how it works-without noticing.
Evolution is embedded in the American consciousness for a simple and terrible reason.
For the past two decades the nation has lived through an episode that has, with extraordinary speed, laid bare the argument of The Origin of Species. The organism involved was unknown in the nineteenth century, but is now familiar. It is the AIDS virus. Its arrival so close to the millennium and the Last Judgment is a useful illustration of God's wrath. Homosexuals, they claim, have declared war on nature, and nature has exacted an awful retribution.