Intelligent Designer: Evolution for Politicians

In the United States today, four words are political hot buttons that no elected official in his or her right mind responds to with deep and honest understanding, although all respond in ways that seem to reveal strong beliefs they hope are congruent with those of the voting majority. These words are: homosexuality, abortion, immigration, and evolution. For all four words, and the areas of daily life they refer to, Americans' levels of education and religious affiliations drive political opinions and eventually public policy.
These words thus are embedded in a complex socio-economic fabric of court decisions, state and federal law, school curricula, theology, and downright hostility toward neighbors who hold different beliefs, no matter how well founded in the reality of human biology those beliefs may be. None of the cultural conflicts surrounding these words seem resolvable, primarily because of the battles between belief and desire on the one hand, and nature on the other, a war that probably has been fought ever since the origin of human consciousness some time in the early Stone Age or before.
In essence, this war is between what we want to happen, and what in fact really happens, here on Earth. But the modern culture war, especially as it is fought in the United States, is actually about what our nation perceives itself to be, and it is sustained by those whose strong, and legitimate, religious beliefs are deeply intertwined with their equally strong, and perhaps not so legitimate, political agendas.
This proposed book-Intelligent Designer: Evolution for Politicians-is intended not so much to win a skirmish over one of the hot button words, but to inform an audience that is disinclined to delve into the academic tomes on the so-called "creation-evolution controversy." When aspiring presidential candidates get asked, as they have in during past preliminary debates, whether they "believe in evolution, " then Intelligent Designer is, or at least should be, required reading for the electorate.