Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
The man behind the Kansas creationism controversy worries that the flap has awakened his opponents -- who hope he's right.
Sep 3, 1999 | Many Kansans were shocked when they opened their newspapers last month to learn that the Kansas Board of Education had voted 6 to 4 to remove the teaching of evolution from the state's science standards -- and that, overnight, they had become the nation's laughingstock. But the decision came as no surprise to Tim Golba.
An anti-abortion activist, Golba has spent the past decade running political action seminars across the state for Kansans for Life, teaching fellow Christian conservatives in the state how to gain political power. This past November, Golba's work paid off, as Christian conservatives took control of the Kansas Board of Education, paving the way for the Aug. 11 school board decision, which in effect gives Kansas' 308 local school boards the choice of whether to include the teaching of evolution in their science curricula.
While that political victory has encouraged Christian conservatives in Kansas and other states, it has also galvanized their political opponents. But they're left playing catch-up, years behind Golba.
"Tim Golba is a genius at political organizing," says Caroline McKnight, the executive director of Mainstream Coalition, a group of moderates formed in 1994 by Kansas community leaders who were alarmed at the "increasing stridency" of the right wing and conservative Christians in Kansas. The coalition has organized a network of moderate citizens, church and synagogue leaders and tries to keep them aware of the activities of the state's extreme right -- militias, hate groups, freemen and ultra-Christian conservatives.
Golba's political opponents would seem to have a lot to learn about political activism from him. A worker at the Pepsi bottling plant in Olathe, a suburb on the southwestern edge of the sprawling Kansas City metropolitan area, Golba, 45, has only a high school education, is unmarried and has no children who might be affected by the Kansas education board decision. Abortion is his top issue: This past week, his group, Kansans for Life, has pursued a 14-year-old Arizona girl seeking a late-term abortion in Kansas after she was raped while a state ward of Arizona.
But for the past decade, he has spent almost every weekend teaching fellow Kansas pro-lifers and religious conservatives how to take over political offices in the state. Golba's coaching has helped Christian right candidates get elected as officers of local Republican Party precincts, as well as local and state school board positions -- offices to which liberal, moderate and apathetic voters in the eastern part of the state have previously paid little attention.
Golba says he learned everything he knows about politics from David Miller, the former Kansas head of the Christian Coalition and former chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. In 1998, Miller ran and lost in a primary bid to become Kansas' Republican candidate for governor.
"David Miller is just such a gifted politician. He knew all the inside stuff, how it all operates," Golba said. "He helped us take the reins of the Republican Party, and taught people of the need to get involved."
Golba's creationism victory reminded Kansas -- and the nation -- that while the Christian Coalition may be falling apart as a national organization, the political skills it taught have been thoroughly learned and adopted by Christian conservatives. And, as the recent Kansas Education Board decision shows, the fruits of its labors are in many cases only now being realized.
Get Salon in your mailbox!