Not often is Dan Brown, however clever, associated with Charles Darwin.

Florida’s lieutenant governor, kicking off Presidency 5, the big Republican shindig and presidential wanna-be debate in Orlando, bundled the two rather disparate writers into the same anti-Christian conspiracy. Along with the media, “They promote The Da Vinci Code,” Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll charged.

Admittedly, a media guy like me, back when the pointy-headed liberal elite was running amuck, might have come to the defense of evolution, but that was before the anti-science, anti-biology, anti-paleontology, anti-archeology, anti-astronomy, anti-geology, anti-genetics, anti-physics, anti-carbon-dating crowd included a Florida lieutenant governor and several leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination.

Lately, I’m beginning to sense the error of my ways, now that Republicans have absolute control in Florida and seem confident of a landslide in 2012. I’ve seen the Gallup Poll that found a majority of Republican voters believe world history began less than 10,000 years ago, back when man was trying to keep those damn dinosaurs from trampling through the flower garden.

Carroll, in her fire-and-brimstone speech on Thursday, spoke disparagingly of how “some of our political leaders bow down to scientists and let them have the stage to push their evolution.” She made it plenty clear that the coming Republican revolution would no longer allow “the minority to poison the minds of the majority.”