About those anti-evo bills in New Hampshire

David Brooks (no, not that one) of the Nashua Telegraph authored a column on the bills submitted by Jerry Bergevin (R-17th) and Gary Hopper (R-7th) pushing ID in state classrooms, and - unsurprisingly - their comments say a lot more about them than it does about the dogmatic science it supposedly responds to:

In our phone conversation, Hopper said there was a second driving factor behind his LSR, born of concerns that cropped up when he was 17.

“I had been filled with this theory of evolution, which if you really boil it down, is a theory that we are here by accident, that there is no purpose. The conclusion is that we’re a bunch of accidents … you really have no purpose for existence,” he said.

“Teaching a child that it’s very possible that they were designed would infer that they actually have a purpose. There’s some purpose they were created, so that is a reason to live. Right now, we’re teaching children that basically they’re animals.”

Ah, creationist dog whistles. They never improve with age, do they? 

The NCSE piece that referred me to Brooks' column is a bit more direct about the ultimate point of all of this:

Brooks, for his part, disagreed with the legislators' view that accepting evolution is tantamount to nihilism, writing that on the contrary, "[c]reationism is meaningless, but evolution is a door to infinite wonder." "But," he concluded, "this is irrelevant here, because it has no bearing on what to teach in science class. My taxpayer dollars pay science teachers to teach science, not philosophy. Let's hope lawmakers don't try to get in the way."