#2623: Mack Butler

Demented antivaccine activist Hilary Butler is a New Zealander. We don’t know if Mack Butler is antivaccine, but he is certainly a full-blown science denialist, conspiracy theorist and wingnut, so it would not surprise us much.

 

Butler, an electrical contractor, was a member of the Alabama House of Representatives from 2013 to 2018, representing Etowah County and St. Clair County, and is, as of 2022, running again. He is most famous for sponsoring a bill to make it harder to remove Confederate monuments in Alabama, ostensibly because “What happened in America was horrible, and it’s important we learn how horrible it was”; he did not specify what he was referring to as being horrible (and we don't dare guess). He also thinks that abortion is “human sacrifice”, and that all supporters of abortion (and all members of the Democratic party) are “pure evil” and “guilty of murder by association”.

 

For the purposes of this entry, however, we are most interested in Butler’s incessant attempts to have creationism taught in Alabama public schools. In 2015, Butler introduced a bill that encouraged science teachers to teach whatever they pleased, without accountability or oversight, in science classes, particularly when it cane to issues prone to “cause debate and disputation”, such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, and human cloning.” According to Butler, it “takes a lot more faith to believe in evolution” because he is unable to distinguish between believing something based on evidence and believing something based on faith. The bill died in committee.

 

In 2017, however, Alabama adopted his House Joint Resolution 78, which adopted language straight out of the creationist Academic Freedom Act promoted by the Discovery Institute (the Discovery Institute was thrilled). Butler said his resolution on science instruction in public schools was an effort to encourage students and teachers to discuss intelligent design, thus ensuring that the resolution would never hold up in court: “In the development of critical thinking, we need to make it welcoming at least for a student or teacher to bring up another theory.” It should bother you that before becoming a representative, Butler was a school board member at Etowah County Schools for 10 years.

 

Diagnosis: If the thought occassionaly crosses one’s mind that surely, given his tactics, Butler must be secretly working to subvert denialist efforts in Alabama, then that is unfortunately extremely unlikely to be the case. Butler is just a dense, wingnut conspiracy theorist.