WESTERN SKIES - June 25, 2005

*** EVOLVE FISH INTERVIEW ***

ERIC WHITNEY: Most of us have seen the Darwin Fish symbol on the backs of cars. It's a takeoff on the Christian fish symbol. The so-called "Evolve Fish" have feet and "Darwin" written inside them. Ever wonder where they come from? Would you be surprised to learn it's Colorado Springs? Philip Lightstone recently talked to the folks who sell the "Evolve Fish" icons.

PHILIP LIGHTSTONE: Gary Betchan and Becky Hale are middle-aged capitalist activists. They also sell the "Evolve Fish" emblems and hundreds of other items which can be found on their website.

GARY BETCHAN: Our web site is called evolvefish-dot-com. We've been running it for about fifteen years and we have about twelve hundred different products, T-shirts, stickers, emblems, that we think of as pro-science and also pro-freedom. We don't see it as anti-religion and a lot of our Christian customers don't see it that way either.

LIGHTSTONE: Not so surprisingly, the website began as a reaction to perceived injustices in a community that has its fair share of culture wars.

BETCHAN: Several years ago I was involved with a Unitarian Church group here in town, and one of the girls in the group was thrown off of her high school swim team in District 20 because she asked the coach to allow her to skip the Christian prayer that he was using to begin each swim meet. And that led to the evolvefish-dot-com web site.

LIGHTSTONE: The website is filled with items for people to express their religious and political leanings. Besides the Darwin emblems there are buttons that warn against burning of books and people, pins, stickers that say things like "God is Just Pretend," t-shirts, caps, books, and miscellaneous items like an Albert Einstein action figure. I asked Gary what sells best.

BETCHAN: The Darwin fish is still one of our biggest ones. We have another emblem that bears the word "evolve" that has taken the Darwin emblem one step further and turned it into a tool user. During the recent presidential campaign we sold a lot of political things also.

LIGHTSTONE: Like most websites, this one also has a link that allows people to email the site owners about anything they wish to discuss.

BETCHAN: We get quite a bit of really good feedback on it. We have, of course, the "burn in hell" letters. And then we have a lot of people who write and tell us stories about how refreshing it is to find some way or someone who shares their outlook on things. It's great to get a letter from a high school student in Alabama who thought he was the only one who doubted religion in the whole world.

LIGHTSTONE: But what must it be like, having such a high-profile position against religion in such a fundamental Christian community as Colorado Springs?

BETCHAN: We don't see it as anti-religious at all. We see it as pro-freedom, pro-science, pro-individuality. We've got things that many extremist Christians certainly would object to. We have things that people who are opposed to civil liberties of various sorts would be opposed to.

We have a Gefilte fish that we sell a lot of to Jewish congregations around the country. We've got a sticker that says "Jesus is a liberal" that we sell quite a few of.

There's a tremendous number of really open-minded, rational, liberal Christian folks in the country, believe it or not, who support other people's right to have their own opinion and a lot of those organizations buy things that celebrate civil rights.

LIGHTSTONE: According to Gary there's even some dialogue between science and religion that removes the mutual exclusiveness of one's beliefs between the two.

BETCHAN: The Catholic church proposes that evolution might be the mechanism by which God created the species. Darwin himself was a practicing Christian all his life. He had some doubts about it. And he expressed those doubts occasionally.

LIGHTSTONE: So if there really isn't that big of a gap between science and religion, why bother marketing products that emphasize the differences?

BECKY HALE: We're here because Colorado Springs is really ground-zero for much of the evangelical movement that's going on in the United States. My family in the San Francisco Bay area used to say, "Oh, you're so reactionary!" Now they say, "Oh what you're doing is so very important!"

LIGHTSTONE: Hale feels that what she and Betchan are doing is important because, she says, people opposed to growing evangelical power in America, need to feel like they're not alone. This at a time when, Hale says, evangelical leaders are trying to extend their influence beyond the pulpit.

HALE: If they only influence the people who went to their churches, then the only danger to me would be the ones that they influence to send me death threats, which I do get. They have gotten into the position of playing in politics. When they play in politics it affects the rules that all of us live under. It affects who you can love, who you can marry, it affects how science is taught in science classes. It affects research for curing diseases. It affects which wars we fight. It affects all kinds of different things that do impact our lives every day.

Our focus is to provide symbols and opportunities for people to come together. As we've seen recently, progressives need a way to reach out to each other, to find one another, to build community. And we have found that over the years the comments we've gotten from our customers is that our products are helping them build community with other people who are of like mind in their areas.

LIGHTSTONE: For Western Skies, I'm Philip Lightstone in Colorado Springs.