We shoulda just let the south secede

Oh, brother.

Another chapter in the fundie nutball crusade to return America to the Middle Ages:

Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film's bottom line - or a producer's decision to make a documentary in the first place.

People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the distribution of a number of films, including "Cosmic Voyage," which depicts the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to clusters of galaxies; "Galápagos," about the islands where Darwin theorized about evolution; and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," an underwater epic about the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from vents in the ocean floor.

One of the very few means we have to get kids interested in science in areas that don't have significant science museums, are these IMAX documentaries, which wed whiz-bang visuals with concrete facts.

Of course, down in old Dixieland, where Jeebus reigns supreme and teen pregnancy runs rampant, God forbid that kids should actually learn something about the natural world if it interferes with the Bible.

Can you imagine the kind of disadvantage we're going to be at in about 30 years, as China joins the industrialized world and India's economy continues to improve? Can you imagine what the U.S. will look like when science is banned and the Bible is the official Law of the Land?