"Marco Rubio: Do you believe in Santa Claus or not?"

Leftwing media pundits were aghast this month.  GQ magazine, that journal of serious political discourse, conducted an interview with Republican Senator Marco Rubio.  In case you decided to check out from politics after Election Day (and I don’t blame you if you did), Rubio is one of the front-runners for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. 

GQ used the opportunity to ask a very relevant and important question burning on the minds of millions of American voters.  Yes, you guessed it:  “How old do you think the earth is?”  In a saner time, the media would have immediately picked up on the oddity of a journalist asking such a question of a politician and questioned the journalist’s motives.  Unfortunately, we do not live in sane times.

Rubio responded thusly:

I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.[1]

This is probably as honest and reasonable an answer we can expect coming from a politician these days, to the extent any politician truly cares about such a matter.  But the point of GQ’s question had little to do with finding an answer.  If that had, in fact, been the point GQ would not be asking the question of a politician in the first place.  

Furthermore, when has GQ, a men’s fashion magazine, ever been concerned with any scientific matter whatsoever?  This question, buried towards the end of the interview and asked completely out of the blue, was meant to provide fodder for the liberal media.  The liberal press, pundits, and talk shows were prepared to pounce on Rubio and to characterize him as a mouth-breathing, knuckle dragging, rube who is so ignorant that he is not to be taken seriously as a contender for the Presidency.  And pounce they did.

Zack Beauchamp from Think Progress wrote, “To suggest we can’t know how old the Earth is, then, is to deny the validity of these scientific methods altogether — a maneuver familiar to Rubio, who also denies the reality of anthropogenic climate change.”

“I got a chill when I read Rubio’s statements,” Phil Plait, an astronomy blogger, wrote in a story at Slate.

 “As I like to say, the GOP doesn’t just want to roll back the New Deal; it wants to roll back the Enlightenment,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote.

The irony in all of this is the lack of “chills” running up any media spines over the complete scientific idiocy of those in their own camp on matters of far more immediate consequence than the age of the earth.   As I wrote in these columns back in October, both pro-choice candidates for Connecticut’s Senate seat were asked when human life begins.  Both candidates said at “birth.” 

Yes, two candidates for United States Senate believe that non-living matter in the womb magically springs to life upon contact with the air of a delivery room.  The absurd idea that life generates spontaneously from non-living matter was scientifically disproven in the 1800’s, but apparently its new espousal in 2012 wasn’t enough to raise a liberal media eyebrow.   Science experiments aside, common sense and an IQ above 10 tells us, especially mothers, that the baby moving inside the womb is alive.  Nevertheless, this story was completely ignored by all “mainstream” media outlets as if it either did not happen, or was of no consequence whatsoever.

 “Scientific" leftists are also obsessed with the entire populous being in lock step agreement on man-made global warming.  Those who dare to ask questions about this questionable theory are now called “deniers” by the left-wing media to try to equate them with Holocaust deniers.  Nevermind the fact that new data showing global warming stopped sixteen years ago was recently ignored by the media. In addition, some scientists are currently warning of another ice age.   But this doesn’t stop the media narrative on global warming as they cherry pick which stories they want to make into “news.”

The bottom line is that true science is not important to the left. Like all other disciplines it is merely a means to an end.  The pro-abortion lobby’s future is tied to legally receiving money to kill unborn babies.  Therefore, to make this palatable to the masses, the unborn need to be absurdly treated as non-human and non-living by the media with nary a peep of protest from the supposed “scientific community.” 

Similarly, in order for the government to be able to control all aspects of human life, there must be a problem that affects all aspects of human life… a problem that needs massive regulations to control.  Enter man-made global warming.  All scientific evidence of temperature changes in the earth’s atmosphere are automatically attributed by the media to some human action that can be controlled.  All evidence to the contrary, or alternative theories are ignored.

Thus, the latest feigned outrage of the left towards Marco Rubio’s answer is but a small sign of things to come.  If it is intolerable that Americans should examine evidence for themselves and form their own opinions on scientific issues, we are one step away from regulated thought control by self-professed intellectual elites.