Clayton Fiscus has been a member of the Montana House of Representatives, serving the 46th District, since 2013, and has already managed to put his stamp on a group already characterized by rank insanity. Already before he got in he drafted a bill that would “[r]equire public schools to teach intelligent design along with evolution,” apparently oblivious to the legal problems that would engender. It died pretty quickly, and one almost pities Fiscus’s attempts to defend his pseudoscience and denialism against the experts during the committee hearing. Here and here are some support letters.
But did he learnanything? Not much at least. In 2015 he was at it again, this time with an academic freedom bill constructed according to the recommendations of the Discovery Institute, that would would encourage high school teachers to present evolutionary biology as a disputed theory and protect those who teach creationism in the classroom, all to “emphasize critical thinking,” as he called it. It died as well, but we don’t for a moment think he’s given up.
Diagnosis: Another inhofely dim bulb in a state legislature. While his efforts on behalf of pseudoscience have failed thus, he is in a position of some power (there’s lots of crazies in the Montana legislature, after all), which is a cause for concern.