Carol Rupe and Sue Gamble are as dissimilar as any two women you're likely to find in Kansas. Rupe, from Wichita, wears her privileged background smartly, her dark blue business suit, sculpted hair and snappy manner of speech evoking country club brunches and sorority reunions. Gamble, who lives in Shawnee Mission near Kansas City, knows what it is to scratch out a living with your hands, lose everything and flee unpaid landlords under the cover of darkness. She's not afraid to put her feet up on the coffee table and salt her language to get a point across.
Get the two women talking about the white-picket-fence 1950s and the nostalgia that lingers palpably here at the epicentre of the American heartland, and you see their differences laid bare.
"I grew up in the Fifties, and I can tell you, it wasn't great," Gamble asserts.
"Actually, I loved every bit of it," replies Rupe.
"Oh bull... Of course you did. You were a doctor's daughter."
"It was great. We had the best education system in America."
"For 20 percent of the kids..."
"Well, yes... bright, white kids... absolutely."
As much as they reflect two very different Americas, what's important about Carol Rupe and Sue Gamble right now are the things they have in common. They're both Republicans, they're both Christians, they're both passionate defenders of public education, and they're both appalled by what their Republican and Christian colleagues on the Kansas State Board of Education did to the state's science standards late last year.
In a move that focused worldwide attention on the growing dominance of religious conservatives in the state's public life, the Kansas school board adopted new science standards that go further than any state in the U.S. in encouraging students to doubt the theory of evolution. And while they were at it, the conservative majority on the school board redefined science itself to make it more amenable to speculation about the supernatural.
Rupe, Gamble and two other dissenting votes on the school board, both Democrats, joined a chorus of opponents in the teaching and scientific communities in condemning the new standards. They argued the board had laid out a welcome mat at the classroom door for intelligent design -- the view that natural explanations such as Darwin's theory of evolution cannot fully explain life's complexity and origins (sidebar, page 14). Embraced by growing numbers of evangelical Christians, intelligent design holds that a cosmic intelligence -- which for most adherents is the God of Genesis -- must have been at work when the universe came to be. Critics contend it's theology masquerading as science, and too close to creationism -- banned from U.S. schools since 1987 -- for comfort. That view was shared wholeheartedly by the judge who heaped scorn on intelligent design as he threw it out of the school system in Dover, Pennsylvania, late last year.
Kansas is now one of five states in the U.S. where religious conservatives have pushed intelligent design-friendly critiques of evolution onto the school curriculum; skirmishes over evolution are taking place in at least 20 others. For some Kansans, the school board's action last fall -- and the sometimes-sneering media attention that came with it -- was a wake-up call. Forces are being mustered to defeat conservative board members in elections later this year so the new standards can be rolled back. It won't be easy; the far-right of the Kansas Republican Party is well-organized, well-funded and well-schooled in the politics of division.
The call to arms is really not much more than an appeal to old-fashioned American common sense. In another time, Carol Rupe and Sue Gamble would be anonymous, well-meaning, hard-working public servants. These days, they're crusaders for moderation.
Although supporters of the new science standards in Kansas have been careful to keep a lid on their use of religious language -- opting instead to wax about academic freedom and intellectual honesty -- one board member couldn't resist a little gloating the day the standards were passed. "It's a sad day for atheists," said John Bacon, who comes from the northeast town of Olathe.
The day had been six years in the making. In 1999, the 10-member Kansas state school board, controlled by religious conservatives who had been flexing their muscle in state politics since the "Summer of Mercy" anti-abortion campaigns in Wichita eight years earlier, shocked the academic and political worlds by gutting the state science standards of virtually anything to do with evolution. Like the standards the board recently passed, it was left to individual schools and teachers to decide what to teach. But the standards would be the basis for state assessment tests given in Grades 4, 7 and 10.
At the time, Carol Rupe was married to a lawyer, the mother of three and employed as a school board official in Wichita, the largest city in the state; she had taught Grade 6 for many years before that. The attack on evolution in 1999 convinced her to mount a run for school board. "I thought it was absurd," she says, "and it made us the laughingstock of the world."
Two hours to the north, in Shawnee Mission, Sue Gamble felt the same push. A mother of two and married since 1961 to a phone company employee, Gamble's interest in education was born largely out of frustration with how the system had failed her own children. She talked her way into a volunteer position as a teacher's assistant, and by the time she tossed her hat into the ring in 2000, she'd been involved for more than 20 years with the local school board.
Gamble's outspoken manner and the fact that her shoestring campaign was trying to unseat the well-heeled chair of the state school board made her an underdog celebrity. Reporters, often from abroad, "followed me around all day, day after day" for several months leading up to the Republican primary. She hated it. "They wanted me to be a poster child for evolution," she says.
But it was her stand on evolution that carried her to a convincing win. Same for Carol Rupe, who defeated a primary opponent she had known and worked with for more than 20 years. "It was hard for me to run against her, but I knew I needed to do it," she says. Both Rupe and Gamble won seats on the state school board that fall, and the balance tipped back to the moderates, 6-4.
In 2001, the board put evolution back into the state science standards. But with lobby groups such as the Kansas-based Intelligent Design Network and the hard-right Kansas Republican Assembly doggedly spreading the anti-evolution gospel in the state's big evangelical churches and among the party's grassroots, the battle was far from over. Elections in 2002 deadlocked the board at 5-5. After the 2004 elections in which the Christian right played a big part in returning President George W. Bush to the White House, control shifted back to the conservatives.
With state science standards due for review, the board chair and the rest of the conservative bloc made it clear they had evolution in their crosshairs. They engineered an end-run around the normal review process so that the standards would end up spotlighting controversies around evolutionary theory and casting doubt on the widely accepted notion that life arose from natural chemical processes. Scientists derided hearings into proposed revisions as "kangaroo courts" and refused to attend. An external review agency complained that the new standards were confusing. Later, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association withdrew reprint permission for two documents the standards had earlier included.
The final document was unfinished when the board met to vote on it last November. Gamble questioned the wisdom of voting on "a pig in a poke." The board chair, a longtime adversary, replied, "It's immaterial because you're not going to vote for it anyway."
With reporters from domestic and foreign news agencies crammed into a meeting room in Topeka, the state capital, the board adopted the new standards by the predicted 6-4 margin.
"A sad day for education in Kansas," said Rupe.
* * *
In 2000, as her mother campaigned for state school board, Sue Gamble's daughter was driving on a Kansas City-area highway when another motorist tried to run her off the road. Her car was plastered with anti-creationist bumper-stickers. Says Gamble: "The man told her, `If I ever see you again, you're dead'."
Rupe and Gamble knew passions over evolution run high in Kansas, but they didn't bargain on the issue consuming as much of their lives as it has. Their e-mail in-boxes are always overflowing. Sometimes the message is one they'd rather not hear. "I get death threats," says Gamble. "I've been told I don't deserve to live."
Both are resigned to being in the line of fire; if a culture war is being fought in the U.S., Kansas is awfully close to front lines. It means that as well as defending a theory that is universally accepted as a foundation of scientific understanding, both women have also found themselves defending their personal faith.
"The way the extreme right sees it, evolution is its own heathen faith, so we're heathens too," says Rupe.
They're not. Rupe is a lifelong Episcopalian, a member of St. Stephen's Church in Wichita. Gamble was educated by nuns; though no longer a practising Catholic -- she takes issue with church doctrine -- she says her faith remains "a deep and abiding part of my being."
Both women have been branded as atheists by opponents who increasingly take an all-or-nothing stand on faith and science -- you must be an atheist if you don't support notions like creationism or intelligent design; or find them guilty of atheism by association -- if non-believers support you, you must be a non-believer too. "It bothers me that people think I'm an atheist," says Rupe. At a school board meeting a while ago, she found herself publicly professing her belief in God as the Creator of the universe. "I said I don't know how you can look at a newborn baby or a sunset on an ocean and not believe God did it. But that doesn't mean you don't teach students good science."
Nor, in her view, does it necessarily mean you ban issues like the controversy over intelligent design from the classroom altogether. "But teach it in comparative religion class, or in philosophy class. Just don't try to teach it as science, because it isn't science."
Rupe says the parishioners at St. Stephen's take her efforts to defend evolution in stride. "Mostly they just thank me for standing up for common sense." If anything, she adds, the battle has forced her to "investigate my own faith more fully. It is now my very strong belief that God is much greater than the God who created the earth in six days."
Same for Gamble. "The fight has strengthened my faith. And what I find sad about this is that it belittles faith in many ways, and the Creator I revere is saddened."
* * *
Everywhere there's a battle over intelligent design, you're likely to find soldiers from a Seattle-based think-tank and advocacy group called the Discovery Institute. Founded in 1991 by a former Reagan administration official, the Discovery Institute filed briefs (which the judge ultimately rejected) and sent prospective witnesses to the intelligent design trial in Pennsylvania last fall. The institute has regularly dispatched envoys to Kansas since the first skirmishes over intelligent design in the late '90s.
In 1999, a memo circulated within the organization outlining a three-stage program for creating intellectual and social conditions ripe for replacing "the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview" with a "science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions" -- intelligent design. The strategy was dubbed the "Wedge Project," and likened scientific materialism to a tree trunk that could be split if a wedge were driven into the weakest point -- evolution.
"They attack evolution because it doesn't have all the answers," says Prof. Bill Wagnon, who teaches history at Washburn University in Topeka. Like Rupe, Gamble and fellow Democrat Janet Waugh, Wagnon, who has served on the state school board since 1996, vehemently opposes the new standards. "You set up unreasonable scientific expectations before you will accept the science. . . . Then you use the controversy as a way to demean and degrade [students'] respect for science."
Wagnon says some of the current board members have links to conservative organizations, but no one can say for sure who or what is pitting Republican against Republican and Christian against Christian in Kansas. "Something is driving it but I cannot tell you what," says Gamble. "So much of it comes in under the radar."
This much is known: Kansas has a knack for being at the forefront of some of the great groundswells of American history. Wagnon cites an old heartland saying: "If it happens, it happens first in Kansas."
American populism took root in the 19th-century struggles of Kansas farmers against the robber-baron railroad owners. Monroe Elementary School in Topeka was the focus of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that began the desegregation of the American public school system; the school is now a national historic site, just blocks away from the offices of the Kansas State Board of Education.
Kansas is the first state in the U.S. to edit evolution out of the school curriculum, put it back, then revisit the issue all over again. Conservative Christian control of the Republican Party's grassroots apparatus, perhaps more complete in Kansas than any other state in the U.S., guarantees that issues with religious overtones -- publicly funded vouchers for private schools, for example -- will continue to loom large on the state's political radar.
Half the state school board is up for re-election next fall. "I'm looking forward," says Wagnon, "to the day when the leadership of the board is so taken with itself that they overplay their hand, and we'll see a reversal of this."
Assuming moderates can be mobilized. As Rupe observes, "by definition, you can't get the moderates out to vote." Several members of the current school board were elected on turnouts of less than 10 percent of eligible voters.
Gamble is deeply involved in the Kansas Alliance for Education, a new organization that she says is already "in launch mode" for the next election, recruiting candidates, signing up campaign workers and raising money. The group's aim is to build bridges in the name of moderation between Republicans, Democrats and the state's huge bloc of unaffiliated voters.
"I see 2006 as a watershed election," she says. "Either moderation is going to return to the state or you're going to see a major decline."
Across the room, her ally in the Kansas evolutionary wars nods in agreement. "We still think there are more moderates than there are those on the far right," says Rupe.
David Wilson is the editor-publisher of The Observer.
