Back here, I wrote that a religion professor at the University of Kansas (the state where the intelligent design debate is taking place) was planning to offer a course entitled "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies.”

According to this article, the professor decided to cancel the course yesterday.  Oh, and somethng else happened yesterday, too:

A college professor whose planned course on creationism and intelligent design was canceled after he derided Christian conservatives said he was beaten by two men along a rural road early Monday.

University of Kansas religious studies professor Paul Mirecki said the men referred to the class when they beat him on the head, shoulders and back with their fists, and possibly a metal object, the Lawrence Journal-World reported.

"I didn’t know them," Mirecki said of his assailants, "but I’m sure they knew me."

Messages left by the Associated Press on Mirecki’s cell phone were not immediately returned.

Sheriff’s Lt. Kari Wempe said Mirecki reported the attack just before 7 a.m.

The professor said he confronted the men after they were tailgating his vehicle along a road south of Lawrence. "I’m mostly shaken up, and I got some bruises and sore spots," he said.

Apparently, religious fundamentalists think it is okay to beat up on religious professors.  Jesus wouldn’t have it any other way, right?

Shakespeare’s Sister provides the larger perspective:

Meanwhile, conservatives go around with liberal hunting licenses stuck on their bumpers, Ann Coulter says a baseball bat is the most effective way to talk to liberals, Bill O’Reilly offers up San Francisco to terrorists, conservative hate groups are on the rise again, violence against the LGBT community is on the rise again, women who report rapes are being prosecuted, pharmacists are telling women they’re being punished by God as they rip up their prescriptions, the poor suffer a constant barrage of shit from conservatives and their policies that allow them to abstractly blather about an “ownership society” but have real-world, life and death consequences for the people subjected to those policies, and the asinine duo of O’Reilly and Coulter have the temerity to moan about how conservatives need to employ security details to protect them from liberals. Can we please have a modicum of perspective on who, exactly, is being attacked here? What’s Ann’s big concern? That she might get another pie thrown at her? Well, sorry—I don’t have a lot of fucking sympathy for someone who incites violence against liberals and then finds herself with whipped cream in her hair.

…Enough with the martyr complex already. The only thing you’ve got left to defend is an unimpeded ability to say whatever you want to say, whenever you want to say it, no matter how outrageous. And to do that, you’ve got to pretend that the evil liberals have taken you out of context, even when they’re just reprinting your direct transcripts. You’re pathetic. Every hate group in the world should have it so good as you.

And P.S. rest of America—they’ll come for you, too, eventually. Then maybe the culture war will be more than just a source of amusement.