#2891: Ashley Gilhousen et al.

There are lots of county school boards in the US, and given relatively few voters and low election participation rates it is perhaps unavoidable that some of them are plagued by loons of various kinds. But religious fundie groups and Christian nationalists have also made concentrated efforts to have science denialists and conspiracy theories elected to these boards over the past decades. We don’t know anything specific about the background for the election of Ashley Gilhousen, who has a degree in nursing and works as a “patient care specialist” at a children’s hospital, to the Clay County, FL, schoolboard, but in 2018, she expressed her dissatisfaction with the county’s selection of science textbooks for grades K-12 because they presented evolution more as fact than as a theory (no, she wouldn’t understand and there probably is little point in trying to tell her). She was also concerned that evolution was the only theory in the textbook used to teach the origin of life and that creationism went unmentioned. As she put it, there “is a whole lot of science that’s been left out of our textbooks”, which is obviously true (we’re talking K-12 textbooks), but Gilhousen was not thinking about science when she used the word ‘science’; she used ‘science’ because she couldn’t use a different word because she also wanted to emphasize that her faith was not a part of this discussion. She also said that her real goal was to have a comprehensive science education that challenges students to think critically and make their own decisions based on empirical evidence and scientific data, which is, as always, a baldfaced lie.

 

Her efforts also gained some local support, e.g. by local pastor Scott Yirka of Hibernia Baptist Church who though it was a shame that students can’t have “supplementary material” when teaching the origin of man; he hastened to add that he wasn’t “necessarily espousing that you teach creationism”, but he was in fact espousing precisely that.

 

The board voted to approve the adoption of the advertised science textbooks in a 3-2 vote; Gilhousen was joined in her opposition by one Betsy Condon. As of 2025, Gilhousen is apparently still on the Clay County Schoolboard.

 

Diagnosis: She might, for all we know, come across as reasonable and caring to those who encounter her in real life. But scratch the surface, and Ashley Gilhousen is also a religious fundie denialist who, in a civilized society, would have no business deciding K-12 textbooks on a schoolboard. Come on.