Knowledge is Evil

Certainly it is evil to contemporary U.S. conservatives. This is a particularly offensive example. It seems the Missouri state senate has, get this a "Committee on the Sanctity of Life." The chair of said committee wants the University of Missouri to prohibit a graduate student from continuing her dissertation work, which is studying the effect of the state's 72-hour waiting period for abortions. It's research -- it doesn't have a pre-determined outcome. And, as grad student Lindsay Ruhr says, "The whole point of my research is to understand how this policy affects women. Whether this policy is having a harmful or beneficial effect, we don’t know."

But, of course, the Committee on the Sanctity of Life doesn't want us to know. Just as the Republicans in the U.S. congress don't want NASA to study the earth because they might find out that it's getting warmer, or other bad news about the Free Market. Just like the church fathers who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. But that didn't stop the earth from going around the sun.