LEADING CANDIDATE FOR FLORIDA MAYOR THINKS EVOLUTION IS NAZI IDEA

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ST PETERSBURG TIMES - Darwin's theory of evolution helped fuel the rise
of Hitler and contributed to the school-shooting massacre at Columbine,
a former St. Petersburg City Council member wrote in a letter urging the
Pinellas County School Board to expose students to alternative theories.

"Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and
survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior
over the weak," Bill Foster wrote board members in a letter received
this week. "This is a slippery slope."

He continued: "One of the Columbine shooters wrote on his Web site, 'You
know what I love? Natural selection! It's the best thing that ever
happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak
organisms.'"

Foster, who recently stepped down after being term-limited from office,
is widely considered to be a leading contender to be St. Petersburg's
next mayor in 2009. He said Friday he wrote the letter, which appears on
his law firm's stationery, as the concerned parent of a high school
student. . .

Foster isn't the first Darwin critic to attempt to link evolutionary
theory to violence and racism, but he is the first public figure in the
Florida debate to do so.

After the Columbine shooting in 1999, then-U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay cited
Darwin's theory as a contributing factor, reading a letter into the
Congressional Record that said public schools "teach the children that
they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some
primordial soup of mud." This summer, Fort Lauderdale's Coral Ridge
Ministries aired a TV special on Christian cable called Darwin's Deadly
Legacy. "To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler," said the group's late
founder, D. James Kennedy.

Foster echoed those words in his letter: "Adolf Hitler duped an entire
generation using Darwin's evolution," he wrote. "He sought to preserve
the 'favored' race in the struggle for survival."

http://www.sptimes.com/2008/01/12/Southpinellas/Foster_links_Darwin__.shtml


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