A serious public debate about the validity of astrology? A serious
believer in the White House? Two of them? Give me a break. What
stifled my laughter is that the image fits. Reagan has always exhibited
a fey indifference toward science. Facts, like numbers, roll off his
back. And we've all come to accept it. This time it was stargazing
that became a serious issue....Not that long ago, it was Reagan's
support of Creationism....Creationists actually got equal time with
evolutionists. The public was supposed to be open-minded to the claims
of paleontologists and fundamentalists, as if the two were scientific
colleagues....It has been clear for a long time that the president is
averse to science...In general, these attitudes fall onto friendly
American turf....But at the outer edges, this skepticism about science
easily turns into a kind of naive acceptance of nonscience, or even
nonsense. The same people who doubt experts can also believe any
quackery, from the benefits of laetrile to eye of newt to the movement of
planets. We lose the capacity to make rational -- scientific --
judgments. It's all the same.
-- Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe Newspaper
-- Company-Washington Post Writers Group
