Intelligent Design for Dummies – The Advocate, 10/30/2005

Great news everyone! I’ve figured out how to deep-six that detestable, untestable, pseudo-scientific, time-wasting, national embarrassment of a non-theory called Intelligent Design. George W. Bush recently mused in an interview that I.D. should be taught in schools along with the theory of evolution, so that no child would be left behind later in life when the cocktail party chat turns to, “How the bleep did we get here?”

Leaving aside the uproarious notion that George, from Georgeville, population: George even be allowed to discuss Intelligence or Design, let alone both, his “thinking” shows some, well, evolution.

As you know, incurious George once remarked, “The jury is still out on evolution.” If he had come to this conclusion after seeing “The March of the Penguins,” I might cut him some slack. The movie, so straight, with an unrelenting emphasis on reproduction, monogamy and heartwarming depictions of male penguins caring for their young [for three months of the year] could be a Penguin Family Values DVD bulk-mailed to megachurches everywhere, but it is no brief for evolution. For millions of years, penguins have parked themselves seventy miles from the nearest protein bar, have not perfected the unprotected egg toss, nor introduced pastels. The jury is left out in the cold. More likely, George, he who sees the world in black and white, watched that snuff documentary “Grizzly Man.”

So why the change in his “thinking”? He seems to have discovered that the Scopes Trial was not a blind test for mouthwash. His Social Darwinism, with its southern strategy of survival of the fittest, has not morphed into a Scientific Darwinism. Chances are it wasn’t from reading about Darwin’s finches or his box. For his “thinking” to have evolved from creationism’s cretinous insistence on nothing older than four thousand years, I speculate someone must have bullet-pointed for him that it takes millions of years to create crude oil.

The flat earthed foolishness of creationism has been forced to evolve into the hybrid theory called Intelligent Design. “The world was made by God,” has morphed into, “The Universe was created by the Grand Designer.” Which is so gay. I think God, the wink wink nudge nudge grand designer is gay, but that was discussed in a previous sermonette.

Intelligent Design is the gayest theory since that darling Irrational Exuberance. Gay and lesbian people have mysteriously propagated for thousands of years without benefit of hand-me-down DNA. The only identifying genetic tag seems to be an orange A-F tab and an ur-tendency toward multi-pocketedness. And all that can mutate inexplicably next spring. When we propagate now, we don’t necessarily produce gay offspring. We have thrived and multiplied amidst the most deleterious of conditions. We are magically known to each other through pheromones or feral moans. Despite hypothalamic studies, finger measurements and gay designer gene mappings, scientists cannot explain definitively what makes some lucky people gay. We just are.

That mysterious, magical, je ne sais quoi-ness is the unprovable crux of Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is Gay. Name it and claim it. Loudly and often. Unlike us, it will be gone in six months.