David Frum quotes my post about Minnesota Governor Pawlenty and his support for teaching “intelligent design” creationism to public school children, and takes exception to my remarks: A Problem for Pawlenty.

Johnson’s comment seems to me radically unfair. Pawlenty is a model of sensible modern conservatism. His answers to Newsweek’s barbed questions indicate an instinct for practical compromise, even as he eschews any personal support for creationism.

Well, I don’t know which interview Frum read, but the Newsweek interview I quoted makes it exceedingly clear that Pawlenty absolutely does personally support creationism. Quote:

Where are you personally?

Well, you know I’m an evangelical Christian. I believe that God created everything and that he is who he says he was. The Bible says that he created man and woman; it doesn’t say that he created an amoeba and then they evolved into man and woman.

That’s creationism, David — and not even the pseudo-scientific “intelligent design” type. It’s pure Biblical literalist creationism. Pawlenty explicitly rejects the scientific theory of evolution, and in a particularly ignorant fashion: his reason for rejecting evolution is that it isn’t mentioned in the Bible, and you don’t get any more creationist than that.

It’s curious that Frum doesn’t even address the other part of my post, about Pawlenty’s anti-gay statements, which are just as troubling as his support for creationism. Pawlenty wants to specifically deny medical benefits to same-sex couples, although he voted in favor of this policy in the 1990s. And he justifies this switch with a bizarre homophobic fantasy about cross-dressing elementary school teachers who do not exist.

In this, he’s mirroring the modern GOP’s shift from a party that used to stand for personal liberties, to a much more radical and atavistic party beholden to the religious right.

If “Pawlenty is a model of sensible modern conservatism,” as David Frum seems to believe, he’s also a model for how badly the party has gone into the weeds — creationist, anti-science, and anti-gay. And by defending this attitude, David Frum shows me again that I made the correct decision to break with the GOP and the right wing.