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Good God, what is this country coming to?

It seems the film Creation, a major-production biopic about Charles Darwin starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, won't be seen in the United States because no distributor with the guts to stand up to the religious right in this country can be found:

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as "a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying".

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.

"That's what we're up against. In 2009. It's amazing," he said.

"The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.

"It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There's still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It's quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.

"Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn't saying 'kill all religion', he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people."

No wonder conservatives believe liberals lack the courage of their convictions. We prove them right every other day.

From The Colbert Report:

Glenn Beck didn't call President Obama a racist, and he didn't compare his health care plan to Hitler's eugenics program.

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On his Fox News show yesterday, Glenn Beck fretted about President Obama's executive order ending the federal ban on funding for certain kinds of stem-cell research:

Beck: This is what bothers me. When we are -- when we put science in front of ethics, we start having a bunch of people walking around -- especially progressive scientists -- walking around in little white coats and talking about, 'Hey, we could make the master race. Why don't we go ahead and use eugenics?' That happened in America with progressives and science, when they decided that we can make people better, and they took out all of the ethics. I mean, what's to say, when we don't attach principles and ethics to things, that this just doesn't go off the road?

Speaking of going off the road ...

Beck was using this line earlier in the day on his radio program. Think Progress has the audio:

BECK: So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

As Ryan Powers at TP observes:

In reality, of course, stem-cell research has nothing to do with the search for a “master race.” Rather, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) explained this morning, “Obama’s executive order is a huge win for the millions of people who suffer from spinal cord injuries, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis and many other illnesses.”

You can read more about eugenics here. Of course, it's worth remembering that in recent years, eugenics has been primarily a right wing obsession (remember The Bell Curve? Or how about the recent eugenics revival at NRO?). It's also worth remembering that even in its original incarnation -- in which progressives were indeed involved -- it was also ardently adopted by such conservatives as the Ku Klux Klan, not to mention the fact that it had a religious component as well.

Beck also appears to be confusing eugenics with genetics. The latter is a "hard" science built out of biochemistry, and ethics are indeed a constant concern for geneticists -- having learned the lessons of eugenics.