#2418: Mike Wilson

State legislatures, again. Mike Wilson is the General Manager of the WCVK Christian Family Radio and has been a member of the Kentucky Senate representing District 32 since 2011, where he has served for instance as chair of the Senate education committee. As chair of that committee, he vehemently objected for instance to adopting the suggested Next Generation Science Standards of 2013, on the grounds that the standards included material on evolution and climate change, topics on which Wilson, as so many others (remember that Kentucky is home to the Creation Museum), chooses to reject the science completely and accordingly doesn’t want that science to be taught to children either.

Now, the Kentucky Board of Education had actually already voted, unanimously, to adopt the standards; but to finalize them, they would also have to go through the state’s regulatory process, which involves public hearings and a review by the state legislature’s House and Senate committees on education. And that’s, of course, where Wilson stepped in to proclaim his ignorance and denialism under the slogan “[p]olitical correctness bears watching and should never be the arbiter of learning.” Of course, he really claimed that correctness shouldn’t be the arbiter of learning; it just became “political correctness” because Wilson’s denial of the science is certainly political and therefore science is politics. Instead of science, evolution and climate change, Wilson has advocated for Bible classes in Kentucky public schools.

Diagnosis: Denialist religious fundamentalist. Kentucky is a fertile breeding ground for such.