The creationism in Kansas stories came about because of a well-known tactic that opponents have come to call “stealth creationism”. This is especially true of the second time they tried to push a creationist agenda on the state. The first time, it took a couple of years, but in 2001 challengers in the state Republican primaries replaced the pro-creationism stealth candidates and voted in a curriculum that explicitly included evolution and the origin and age of the earth again.

In 2004, there was a stealth creationist majority again that ran candidates and basically existed only to push the creationist agenda. I was actually in Kansas for this one, just 30 minutes’ drive from the state capital, as I noted above. From this proximity, I was able to attend the state BoE hearings and see how much the creationist majority simply ran roughshod over popular opinion, not just from the professors and teachers in the area, but also from parents and the general public at every hearing. The new pro-IDC standards were approved in 2005, and the following year everyone who was up for re-election who voted for that was defeated in primary challenges by other Republicans.

The only reason these situations came about is because Kansas is a heavily Republican state, so any Republican candidate for state BoE who wins the primary election is practically guaranteed a seat. But if the general public wanted creationism in its schools then it wouldn’t be necessary to run stealth campaigns, nor would the candidates constantly be defeated at the primary stage as soon as their terms were up. If Kansans wanted creationism, then they’d just brave the public ridicule, which didn’t have any affect on anybody at the time, even the supporters of proper science, and keep their creationist BoE members.

And on a happier topic, there was a book that came out while I was living in Kansas called Oceans of Kansas: A Natural History of the Western Interior Sea by Michael J. Everhart of the Sternberg Natural History Museum. It’s a book I can recommend highly.