Science said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice — on evolution, on catastrophic, human-induced global warming, and on raw milk.
That’s right, raw milk, and Food Safety News has the inside scoop on “Raw Milk to Evolution: Americans Disregard Science.” Pulitzer Prize-winning (I kid you not) former Seattle Times reporter Ross Anderson has the exposé:
Whatever their politics, these raw milk devotees are at odds with the overwhelming weight of scientific and medical authorities, who declare unpasteurized milk is no healthier than processed, and the lack of pasteurization greatly increases the risks of being sickened by E. coli, Campylobacter or other harmful microbes.
If you didn’t think the whole “denying science” meme — with its overt nod to Holocaust denial and more subtle hints of the dread of religious heresy — had yet descended to the level of self-parody, then it certainly has done so now. In Anderson’s telling, it’s all tied in with the indispensable bogeyman “fundamentalist Christians,” naturally, and a quote from Chris Mooney seals the deal:
“Science denial today is considerably more prominent on the political right,” he writes, especially on “climate and related environmental issues, anti-evolutionism, attacks on reproductive health science by the Christian right and biomedical issues.”