If you had any doubt that bad craziness is on the rise in America, here’s an LA Times report on the increasing number of California parents who refuse to let their children be vaccinated, because of pseudo-scientific fear-mongering by fringe groups.

A rising number of California parents are choosing to send their children to kindergarten without routine vaccinations, putting hundreds of elementary schools in the state at risk for outbreaks of childhood diseases eradicated in the U.S. years ago.

Exemptions from vaccines — which allow children to enroll in public and private schools without state-mandated shots — have more than doubled since 1997, according to a Times analysis of state data obtained last week.

The rise in unvaccinated children appears to be driven by affluent parents choosing not to immunize. Many do so because they fear the shots could trigger autism, a concern widely discredited in medical research.

There is absolutely no evidence that measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR) causes autism, and parents who buy into this madness are endangering not only their own children, but everyone else’s kids as well. This is a very scary phenomenon.