Freedom of speech is an Enlightenment ideal - unless it is someone we disagree with politically, then it is common to say they are being an ideologue, when it comes to politics, or on the take, when it comes to science, or #partoftheproblem, when it comes to cultural militancy.

Advocates have mastered their framing when it comes to science. That is why political groups like Union of Concerned Scientists and National Resources Defense Council can say they accept science when it comes to climate change, but when it comes to food, energy and medicine, they are not anti-science, they are just 'testing the conclusions' of science in a reasonable way. 

Evidence used to be the one thing that grounded us all. But with 25,000 open access journals out there, and suspect levels of peer review in even the most popular ones, you can surely find evidence for just about anything, from neonics and bee deaths to superior nutrition in organic food.

How scientific is your political candidate? Probably not very. Even scientists and M.D.s in Congress are criticized as anti-science if the critics happens to favor a pet project that the elected official does not. President Obama overturned the science consensus of his own researchers when it came to Yucca Mountain and Keystone XL, he bans Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer despite biologists wanting to be able to study it, he edited science reports on the Deepwater Horizone oil spill to match his agenda - that sounds an awful lot like the exact same criticisms President Bush got, yet groups like UCS have yet to say anything critical because those are all positions they can't use to raise money from their partisan donor base. They are not exceptional, I simply note them because they were so high-profile in criticizing Bush, but all those lobbying groups do the same thing.

So if M.D.s and scientists in Congress are immediately dismissed by opponents when they get into office, why do we see calls in the science community for more scientists in public office? Are scientists exceptional when it comes to policy choices? It seems not. The list of academics, including Nobel laureates, who rushed to endorse President Obama because he was going to 'restore science to its rightful place' is longer than my arm, 

http://theconversation.com/how-an-approach-to-science-helps-define-the-p...

There are more black belts with tenure in academia than there are Republicans. Flickr/Steve Rhodes, CC BY-NC-ND