I’m so glad Bill Nye and the psycho at the Creation Museum are going to debate. I’m sure this will 100% conclusively settle everything once and for all.
There is an active, concentrated, well funded effort to eliminate it from schools. When I was in high school I asked my biology teacher where the evolution chapter of my textbook was and she explained that she wasn’t even allowed to TALK about the absence of evolution in the curriculum. She had already been instructed on how to deny information about evolution to students like myself WHO SPECIFICALLY REQUEST SUCH INFORMATION. I asked her point blank “So someone else has decided my education will be incomplete?” And she had a pained look on her face when she told me yes. I realized at this point that she was being forced into this to save her job, and it was not her fault, so I dropped it. But it pissed me off. It’s 20 years later, and I’m STILL pissed off. And it killed her to leave evolution out, too. I think she was almost as pissed about it as I was.
The whole campaign by the Christian creationists was not for equal time, as they claimed, but to actively eliminate evolution as an option for even those students who wanted to learn it. Ignorant, zealous, low level local government in the form of the school board had decided their religion was superior to hundreds of years of scientifically accumulated knowledge, and therefore I would go to college without receiving the same fundamental evolutionary biology education that middle school children are given in other countries. You’re goddamned right I’m pissed off.
I could go on, but I think Isaac Asimov said it best: “…Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.”