elfs | "Science" is a scare word now.

I heard this yesterday and it made me wonder what the heck Mitt Romney was talking about. He said, "Senator Obama is wrong if he thinks science-based sex education has any place in kindergarten. We should be working to clean up the filthy waters our kids are swimming in."

First, the non-sequitor there is just plain surreal, but what caught my eye was Romney's use of the phrase, "science-based." Apparently, Romney is responding to a throwaway quote from Barak Obama, "But it's the right thing to do, to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in schools." It's no trick to figure out how Romney got "kindergarten" out of "age appropriate," that's just plain scare politics.

But my brain keeps circling back to the phrase "science-based." Why would Romney say it that way?

Rick Perlstein set me straight. Romney is playing up the idea science is scary. Science is bad. Science is what wants to bar your children's hearts from god, teach them they're monkeys, that our star and our world is ordinary, that the principles of physics do not care about them.

Romney wants to ride the eloi to victory with the promise that he'll keep the scary morlocks over there.