The cure for cults that want to deny others their freedom of speech is more freedom of speech -- Fredric Rice

Mencken's debunking of the chiropractic fraud is quite lengthy, covering the unfounded, unscientific, utterly unworkable claims which the fraudulent chiropractic industry inflicts upon its unwitted, ignorant victims. The article covers the fact that the lowest morons of the Republic do the rest of us the grand favor of removing themselves and their "get" from the gene pool thanks to their often fatal belief the chiropractic fraud. For Mencken, however, the fatalities aren't frequent enough:

I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make morons immortal. If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney's spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven.

And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan in 1967. In such matters I am convinced the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of the medical busybodies who now try to run us. If the later gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of hangmen, Prohibition agents, and other legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether, and so that present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear.

I can't convince myself that would be of any good to the world. On the contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far -- if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To that end, nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer specific goes through the mails, Homo Americanus is improved to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone, the same high end is achieved.

I'm left wondering why mainstream newspapers are unwilling to employ such straight forward rhetoric these days. Applauding self-administered Darwinian selection at the hands of the dim-witted that fall for the quack medical scams being sold on every street corner seems rather unkind, but suggesting that such self-administered selection improves the gene pool for the betterment of the human species is unkinder still.

But is the suggestion truthful? It may be unkind to suggest that when parents subject their offspring to fatal quack medical scams, they're doing the human species a favor by improving the breed, but is it truthful? Is the dim-wittedness which allows a parent to believe quack medical claptrap a genetic trait which is passed off to one's offspring? I don't think it is. I think that children must be well indoctrinated into occult, magical thinking and that if a child is allowed to develop normally, employing science comes naturally to child who will grow up to recognize quack medical scams for what they are and thus avoid them.

Parents who subject their children to fatal quack medical scams don't improve the gene pool, but maybe they improve the health and safety of their neighbors who might otherwise have been contaminated by such occult, magical thinking. Better still would be to leave their children alone and only subject themselves to their fatal stupidity for the immediate betterment of not only society in general but their children in the specific.

Mencken apparently recognized the fact that moronic belief in quack medical frauds like chiropractic weren't passed down to offspring genetically; his comments appear to be more rhetoric than actual wishful thinking. In fact he laments the fact that chiropractic isn't totally and completely fatal:

But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect. It has superb potentialities, but only too often they are not converted into concrete cadavers.

Mencken wishes that chiropractic was perfect: that every believer who subjects themselves to the fraud would improve the species by dieing because of it.

Creationist occultism and magical thinking aren't fatal but they're most certainly debilitative. If creationism was fatal some how -- if creationism also required following the Biblical mandate of drinking poison to prove one's faith, perhaps -- maybe it would have died out long ago and the rest of us wouldn't have to look at these dim-witted morons trying to push their occultism in our public schools. Creationism is like some kind of seemingly endless infection from a modern day Typhoid Mary, a debilitative disease which society must suffer. (Now we must expend effort to inoculate ourselves and our children but doing so makes us stronger.)

In a world-wide marketplace I can't imagine how a believer in creationist occultism could manage to compete successfully with students who actually employ science. I can't imagine ever seeing an oil industry executive examining resumes and considering calling in a "graduate" of the Institute for Creation Research cult's mock "school" to help out with the company's oil exploration program knowing that the dim-witted moron on the resume thinks the Earth is only some 10,000 years old.

While not fatal, the best we can achieve is that the sons and daughters of creationist parents are unable to compete in the market place along side our own sons and daughters who we allow to learn and apply science. Our society needs its ditch diggers and its fast food workers; our society needs its lower class (even if we pretend to be a classless society.) Isn't it so convenient that creationists have volunteered to fill that requirement?

Any text written by the creationist cult which may be quoted within this criticial examination of the creationist cult is provided according to U. S. Code Title 17 "Fair Use" dictates which may be reviewed at http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html

"You can lie about ICR all you want." -- Jason Daniel Henderson

"Thank you for your permission however there's never any need to. Creationist propaganda is already self-debunking." -- Fredric L. Rice

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