The people who think the government is keeping them away from the awesomeness of unpasteurized milk should be lumped in with the anti-vaxxers. Before pasteurization, milk was one of the world's most dangerous food products (tuberculosis, brucellosis, diphtheria, other diseases). From 1912 to 1937, approximately 65,000 people in England and Wales died of tuberculosis contracted from consuming milk. And yet...there are idiots who think that raw milk is the secret cure for, well, everything that ails you and that pasteurization is a big secret government plot.

"It sure is unfair that parents who refuse to believe in science, and are endangering their children and their entire communities"

That's the thing right there. If a person is an idiot and only a danger to him/herself, go for it dude. Jump over that safety railing and stand on the edge of the crumbling cliff because the Park Service is clearly trying to keep you away from something awesome. But if your idiocy endangers others, as the anti-vax crap clearly does, we got a problem.

I'm rather surprised she was working for Fox in the first place. She's not a blonde.

"Because, says Paul, the attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi “was, in fact, one of the worst intelligence failures in our history,”"

Rand Paul doesn't have even a nodding acquaintance with "intelligence".

If she did, she'd have to get a job.

"With so much controversy around science these days, who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong?"

Fun fact. Sarah Palin's father was actually a science teacher.

I wasted my time trying to correct "facts" spouted by people yesterday. My little version of tilting at windmills.

I'd rather he just explain The Beatitudes and Matthew 25:34-46 to them. Feed the hungry, welcome strangers, care for the sick, all that hippy dippy stuff.

Drinking and dancing are encouraged*, in fact, as they lead to the production of more Catholics.

* - spoken as someone who has both consumed alcohol and danced in a Catholic church hall. Many times.

"Even though that’s not exactly a new idea in Catholicism — Yr Dok Zoom remembers being taught the same in catechism back in the early 1970s — the prevalence of creationist nonsense among American fundamentalist Protestants leads lots of people to think that Catholicism is similarly anti-science. Jeez, you send a few astronomers to the Inquisition on heresy charges and suddenly everybody thinks you don’t like science!"

Finally, someone writing on Francis' comments gets it right. The articles coming out over the last day or so having been driving me crazy. The writers could go to a source, say the Vatican's own webpage, search on the term evolution and find an interesting series of documents and discussions starting in about 1950. But nooooo, it's easier to just assume that Catholics and fundies are the same except that Catholics like a lot more gilded stuff and their leaders dressed up in anachronistic outfits.

Pope Francis' statements were exactly in line with that the Church has been teaching for a long time. They are also exactly in line with his friggin degree in CHEMISTRY. Yes, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church is a scientist. Pat Robertson can stuff that in his pipe and smoke it.

The Roman Catholic Church has it's problems (several are HUGE), but this isn't one of them. It's a huge, old institution and one that people assume a lot about, mostly from the Church's anti-abortion stance. Guess what conservatives? The RC Church is also anti-death penalty and does a lot for the poor (although they are happy to take money from the rich, of course) and Francis (among others) has spoken out against income inequality. You can't judge the Church based on only one issue, nor can you judge it based one one issue or on the statements of one bishop from Missouri or the Deep South.