The Washington Post's On Faith microsite is most notable for regularly featuring anti-gay and anti-Muslim bigotry and questioning the president's religion and setting Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin up as the nation's leading religious thinkers. But that isn't all the Sally Quinn project does: It also traffics in casual falsehoods.

Most recently, On Faith's Julia Duin claimed that “Evolution runs directly counter to most major world religions, which teach that God created the world in some form or another.” Lauri Lebo responds at Religion Dispatches:

Really? Just off the top of my head I can think of a few major religions that have no trouble reconciling evolution with faith, including Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and all non-fundamentalist versions of Protestantism, such as, for instance, the United Methodist Church.

Duin was writing about a recent study, which I wrote about here, which indicates that one in eight biology teachers are teaching creationism in the classroom. Duin takes a rather sympathetic view to those creationist and intelligent design-spouting teachers and wonders whether it's fair to make them teach evolution when they don't accept it. For some reason, Duin leaves out a discussion of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and the litany of federal court rulings against teaching creationism/intelligent design or banning the teaching of evolution in public school science classes.

Duin, it should be noted, isn't some random On Faith contributor: She was religion editor for The Washington Times and now "anchor[s] Under God's daily discussion of religion in the news" for the Post.

Lebo concludes:

I sincerely hope Washington Post's religion editors take note of Duin's factual inaccuracy, which cries out for a correction. A newspaper of the Post's reputation owes far more to its readers than to print blog posts of different viewpoints to generate buzz, without regard to the facts. Duin's just-so assertion, which was not backed up by a shred of evidence, shows a woeful lack of understanding of her beat, and insults the beliefs of the countless people of faith she so casually dismissed.

The Post should also consider whether it is appropriate for the person who leads its daily “discussion of religion in the news” to put her thumb on the scale. As Lebo noted, Duin “takes a rather sympathetic view to those creationist and intelligent design-spouting teachers.” Here's how Duin concluded her piece:

Should high school and college teachers be mandated to teach evolution even if it's against their religious beliefs?

That phrasing (“mandated,” “even if,” etc) is certainly sympathetic to people who want to deprive schoolchildren of the opportunity to learn about established science. A more neutral phrasing might have been: “Should science teachers be allowed to refuse to teach science they don't like?” And a more neutral consideration of the question might have considered the implications of allowing teachers to refuse to teach things they don't like. If a teacher can refuse to teach evolution, can she refuse to teach the Earth orbits the Sun? Can a history teacher who is a pacifist refuse to teach his class about World War II?