Global warming, 2/3 Republican deny it, more than 3/4 Democrats believe it: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-30/global-warming-l...
Creationism is 38% for Democrats, 60% for Republicans: http://www.cultureofscience.com/2011/08/19/republicans-and-d...
I think Republicans are more likely not to want to mention or distribute condoms to teens in sex education, but I don't regard this as quite the same general disregard for science and math.
The political parties themselves would very much like you to believe that you're along with them for the ride on all their issues, and this no doubt accounts for much of the strongly held beliefs of both Democrats and Republicans. Push comes to shove, most people have not given much thought to the issues that politics have the most control over.
You can vote a specific interest, you can vote a straight party line, you can vote out of ignorance. But one thing that makes zero sense is to vote party-line in 2012 to punish a party for what it did 60 years ago. Doing that has literally the opposite impact as you'd ostensibly intend.
What are you babbling about? Public employees weren't unionized in the 60s and early 70s.
And, the pension stuff started in the 90s.
With only two choices, people are roped into supporting all kinds of things that make no sense for them. But you get "My party believes in science!" and "My party believes in God!" and it becomes part of people's political identities. And then all sorts of other issues are piled on top of it and you find yourself wondering how we got here.
It's ludicrous, really.
Read Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100".
Is that intended as a recommendation of a scientific source about long-term trends cross-culturally? I got a big volume of the collected "future history" stories by Robert Heinlein out of the library a year ago, and I was disappointed by how poorly those stories have aged. I also figured out, by rereading Heinlein (a favorite author of mine when I was a kid) that he never informed any of his stories with much perspective from non-Western cultures (although I give him credit for being aware of that kind of issue). Since I spent three years in the 1980s and later another three years spanning the turn of the last century living in a non-Western country, I don't turn to Western science-fiction stories anymore for my social commentary. I like to read real science based on verifiable history to puzzle out social trends. I can recommend a source
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
and invite other readers here to recommend other sources. I'm not worried about fundamentalist religion "getting control" of science.
Not extremely well. You've cherry-picked your data to support your theory.
Specifically, I notice you don't touch on those who reject vaccinations, practice homeopathy, or believe Feng shui goes beyond aesthetics.
As someone living in a very large, liberal city and hailing from a rural, conservative town, I can tell you the Republicans of the world are not the ones debating if vaccinations cause autism. The ones I know think it's moronic & hideously irresponsible not to vaccinate your child.
It's a fairly settled issue in social science, though, that abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work. Not a hard science, perhaps, but still a science in that it's data-driven and rejects hypotheses based on new data.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1097%2FGCO.0b013e3282efdc0b
http://journals.lww.com/co-obgyn/pages/articleviewer.aspx?ye...
Reality is much more nuanced than "blue versus red".
So? The alternative to abstinence-only sex ed isn't perfection, it's a bunch of stuff that doesn't work all that well either.
Your links are all behind paywalls. That said, they're probably just like the other work on the subject. Their "measure of success" is curious at best. (No, reducing teen pregnancy isn't the only goal.)
As to "telling teaching inaccuracies", no other teaching is held to that standard, so why is abstinence-only sex ed held to that standard?
Note - I think that abstinence-only sex ed is a bad idea. My point is that the arguments are not "scientific" or fair. That said, they are doing a great job in discrediting science. If that's your goal....
Because kids going around with misconceptions about what really caused the American Revolution is less dangerous than kids going around with misconceptions about reproductive issues.
Umm, if it doesn't matter whether it is true, why are we teaching it?
And no, sex ed isn't the only dangerous thing that we mis-teach kids about.
But, thanks for demonstrating your priorities.
However, I'm still unclear on why I should be paying for them.