Conservatives, You Can’t Trust Them

For years now, (increasingly) extremist Conservatives have been slowly stealing away our rights (and blocking the inception of others), in the name of religion and in the name of tradition. In the US, right-winger Bill O’Reilly has labelled it a war: secular progressives against ‘traditionalists’ (No, I haven’t read his book: Culture Warrior, nor do I intend to). Abortion, religion, privacy, the War on Terror, gay marriage and taxes are frequent battle grounds, in an increasingly polarized democracy. It’s getting worse here in Australia, too. Constant Readers will know that the Religious Right in Australia are a particular bunch of conservatives that I don’t care for. Abbott and his cohorts have in the past blocked my access to RU486, my right to wed a same-sex partner, and to have my incurable disease treated with stem-cells. You can see why the trend is worrying, and why these constant encroachments anger me.

Today though, I’ve learned that a new batch of conservatives have taken it further than usual and targeted something close to my heart: Wikipedia. For context, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia built up by contributions from everyone on the Web (it’s one of the reasons ‘we’ were time person of the year this year”). It’s a one-stop shop for everything you ever wanted to know, and is highly addictive. While it’s still only relatively young, it boasts over 1.67 million articles in English – and it’s still growing fast.

So how do you usurp Wikipedia? Well apparently, you create an alternate online encyclopedia and call it Conservapedia. According to the site: “Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American”, as well as allegedly inaccurate. You can check the validity of these statements for yourself, but I’m naturally sceptical of an ‘encyclopedia’ whose entry for Evolution claims that it’s only a ‘theory’ that inadequately describes how man came to be. Worse, I find it hard to swallow that Unicorns were put aboard Noah’s Ark, before the Great Flood… I don’t even know where to start with that one.

Overall, I think its clear that the Conservative (and religious) view of the world is increasingly being forced down our throat – and I don’t like it. Not that I'd prefer the liberals to be pushing themselves on me either, we should be free to decide without ideological input. In the spirit of freedom of speech, good luck to the Conservapedians, but this administration will always argue that facts (the type you find in encyclopedias) shouldn’t be tarnished with religious belief or political ideology. They should just be.