“The Truth Shall Set You Free” … as long as the truth conforms to the principles adhered to at Conservapedia.com .That’s right, the right-wing believes that Wikipedia is riddled with non-truth. What Wikipedia strives for–a doggedly open debate about facts–results in what conservatives feel is a liberal bias. How very interesting. And so, Conservapedia was born. The Los Angeles Times covered an article in today’s paper about this.

It fascinates me for several reasons.

First, this new wiki is fraught with outright lies mixed with a good deal of status quo truth. This will cause it to appear as a viable resource to some, and result in the spread of misinformation. This is exactly the type of thing people fear from the original Wikipedia, but which hasn’t manifested itself to any great extent.  Until now.

Second, it appears as if the Religious Right (truly the term “conservatives” would be too broadly applied here) have so thoroughly gone off the deep end that they require a parallell set of resource tools to corroborate their story. I can see it now: radical right-wing Senators will be quoting Conservapedia as a credible source on the floor of Congress. The resulting uproar would appear as hair-splitting.

Third, this causes me grave concern. It is appearing more and more as if America has two distinct cultural groups. I may sound like an alarmist here, but the last time the country was so polarized that the two groups could not agree on how words are to be defined, the outcome was not pretty. A nation needs a single culture and zeitgeist to be unified. It doesn’t appear that we currently have that.

Fourth, I encourage everyone to contribute facts to Conservapedia, as in their case, the Truth truly Shall Set Them Free.