dinos, the bible and the republican party

Dinosaurs, evangelicals and the state
By Justin Webb BBC Washington correspondent
Should the views of the religious right, many of whom are Republican party supporters, be adopted by the US government? In Washington, Justin Webb considers the implications and asks whether politics and religion make a good mix.
We are having dinner at the house of some friends who are supporters of President Bush.
Their five-year-old son, a classmate of our children, takes me upstairs to see his collection of dinosaurs.
Little Meade is a passionate palaeontologist and this is a land of plenty so the room heaves with prehistoric life.
I am suitably impressed, but unknown to Meade I am not here to admire the bone structure of the dinosaurs.
I am in this room on assignment, because in modern America Meade's dinosaurs are at the heart of the travails of a political party and I need to find out something about Meade's parents which will affect our relationship.
I need to know what they told him about when the dinosaurs existed.
Millions of Americans, most of them supporters of the Republican party, believe that the world was created only a few thousand years ago as per the account in Genesis and the dinosaurs can only date from then, so the Tyrannosaurus Rex romped around with Adam and Eve.
In other words these Americans, heirs to every scientific advance in history, deny rational accounts of how the world came to exist.
And Meade's parents - I know his mum teaches Sunday school - might be among them.
I put the question to Meade: "When did the dinosaurs live?"
There is an agonising pause as he considers it. American children are wonderfully earnest and Meade is not going to be rushed.
Eventually he says it is in a book his Dad bought him.
We hunt the tome, find it, open the page and behold a diagram which has been explained to Meade.
It all floods back.
The dinosaurs, he informs me with great authority and aplomb, are millions and millions and millions of years old. I could have hugged him and his parents; we are, after all, inhabiting the same mental planet. .............