There are some boobs out there — some of them in the Republican party — who would, if entrusted with the awesome powers of the presidency, attempt to use those powers to strong-arm high-school biology teachers in Poughkeepsie into including the Genesis account of creation as part of their science curricula. If you want to know whether Scott Walker is one of them — or whether as president he’d insist that NASA use a pre-Copernican model of the solar system the next time it launches a Mars probe — then ask that question. Walker hasn’t given any indication that he is in fact such a politician, but if it sets anxious minds at ease, then, by all means, make the relevant inquiry.

I have made the point here a dozen times — and you’d think that one of these big-on-science guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye would take up the cause — that there is in reality an important federal project under way giving rank pseudoscience and pure hokum the force of law: Obamacare, which, thanks to the efforts of Senator Tom Harkin (D., Iowa), will oblige taxpayers to subsidize all manner of scientifically illegitimate “alternative medicine.” Everybody wants to know what Scott Walker and Sarah Palin think about evolution, but almost nobody is asking what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama think about homeopathy, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and the like. The same people who are scandalized that Walker doesn’t want to talk about something that he doesn’t know the first thing about celebrate as the most important health-care advance in a generation a law that treats as legitimate sundry species of quackery based in pure mysticism.

Why?