The Tea Party's victorious upstart Christine O'Donnell has paraded some "biblical" viewpoints in her pursuit of public office, equating a lack of school prayer with weekly school shootings and masturbation with adultery. Her extreme stances, along with her bizarre and unfounded attacks against the GOP's mainstream candidate Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), have alienated traditional GOP operatives and conservative activists and pundits alike.
Today, New York Magazine dug up another of O'Donnell's right-wing positions. Back on March 30, 1996 in her role as spokeswoman for the conservative Christian policy organization Concerned Women of America, O'Donnell "squared off" on CNN against a University professor to advocate for teaching creationism in the classroom. In trying to debunk "every legitimate scientist in the world," O'Donnell insisted "hard evidence" proves evolution is "merely a theory" and God's creation of the world in "six 24-hour periods" is fact:
O'DONNELL: Well, as the senator from Tennessee mentioned, evolution is a theory and it's exactly that. There is not enough evidence, consistent evidence to make it as fact, and I say that because for theory to become a fact, it needs to consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests that they put — that they use to support evolution do not have consistent results. Now too many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact. But when you get down to the hard evidence, it's merely a theory. [...]
Now, he said that it's based on fact. I just want to point out a couple things. First of all, they use carbon dating, as an example, to prove that something was millions of years old. Well, we have the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens and the carbon dating test that they used then would have to then prove that these were hundreds of millions of years younger, when what happened was they had the exact same results on the fossils and canyons that they did the tests on that were supposedly 100 millions of years old. And it's the kind of inconsistent tests like this that they're basing their 'facts' on. [...]
Well, creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.
As New York Magazine points out, her "scientific takedown" of carbon dating is solely based on tests run by one "young earth creationist" at the Institute for Creation Research. The "biblically-inspired" young earth creationists are "at the hard core end of the creationist spectrum" who believe that "humans coexisted with dinosaurs."
Her wholesale belief in "hard core" creationism even pushes her to the right of her personal champion, Sarah Palin. While Palin shares O'Donnell's "creationist leanings," she believes there is "evidence of microevolution" in which "God created us" but also "create[d] an evolutionary process that allows species to change and adapt." While McCain staffers "winced" at this position in 2008, Palin — like O'Donnell — strongly felt she was "standing on solid factual ground" and agrees that it should be taught in schools.
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