As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?

As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its universality.

Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.

Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.

Without a unified political climate of opinion, there is little or no political profit in doing the right thing.

If you have no authority to legislate my freedoms, then I'm truly free, at least from you.

Wrong people are wrong not because of their faults but because of their presumed virtues.