Daylight Atheism readers undoubtedly remember Kent Hovind, a bottom-feeder creationist with a degree from a diploma mill and a phony $250,000 offer for anyone who could offer “proof of evolution”. You probably also remember that Hovind is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence for federal tax evasion. But what you might not know is that Hovind’s son, Eric, has a blog of his own – and judging by a recent post, the wingnut apple doesn’t fall far from the crazy tree.
The post, titled “Welfare Poem”, is an unabashedly racist piece of drivel, written in deliberately broken English and demonizing immigrants as lazy, shiftless parasites. Here’s an excerpt (brief, since I can’t stand to quote much from garbage like this):
Finally, white guy moves away,
Now I buy his house, and then I say,
‘Find more aliens for house to rent.’
And in the yard I put a tent.
Send for family they just trash,
But they, too, draw the welfare cash!
Everything is very good,
And soon we own the neighborhood.
We have hobby it’s called breeding,
Welfare pay for baby feeding.
Surely this is what Jesus would have wanted!
I don’t know who originally wrote this racist filth, but a Google search for “welfare poem” finds that the number-two result is a copy of the poem quoted approvingly at the white supremacist website Stormfront. Hovind’s post ends with a bogus quote claiming that immigrants make more in welfare than retirees make in pension – as Snopes points out, this was originally written about Canada, not the U.S., and it wasn’t even true then.
You may have noticed I linked to a Google cache version of the page, because Hovind later deleted the original post after he realized that he was going off-script. Ardent creationists aren’t supposed to be racists; it shines a light on parts of their movement’s history that they’d just as soon see forgotten. Lest you think the Curse of Ham is just a relic of ancient history, here’s the father of the modern creationist movement, Henry Morris, in a book that was republished as recently as 1991:
“Yet the prophecy again has its obverse side. Somehow they have only gone so far and no farther. The Japhethites and Semites have, sooner or later, taken over their territories, and their inventions, and then developed them and utilized them for their own enlargement. Often the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have become actual personal servants or even slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane matters, they have eventually been displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites.” (source)
In his carefully phrased non-apology, Hovind claimed that his original post was meant to express only “a simple dislike for lazy people who USE the government, do not work, and expect to get paid for doing nothing”. This would only have been plausible if the poem hadn’t so prominently depicted people of color as the sole perpetrators and referred to them as “trash” who wear “turbans” and who want to “own the neighborhood” by breeding prolifically and driving white people away.
Sentiments like this always bubble up from the sewers whenever racists think decent, good-hearted people aren’t watching. Hovind’s hasty backpedaling shows that he got caught red-handed, and knew it – but the next time this ignorant, hateful creationist claims to be a moral authority, remember his words.