http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html?_r=4&pagewanted=2&hp&pagewanted=all
TL;DR: Math is hard - let's go shopping!
I wanted to drop the author a piece of email to point out the obvious: today we have technology that is capable of destroying the population many times over. This technology is in the hands of the politicians, who are representatives of the population.
Understanding the impact of this technology requires command of science - both the facts (no, Earth is not 10,000 years old, and no, Jesus is not going to come raining radioactive waste on infidels long before we boil the planet in greenhouse gas emissions) - as well as scientific apparata (what scientific "theory" means, how they are built, what is applicability of it, and how they evolve over time, why the fact that evolution or climate change are "theories" does not mean that one day we won't find that they are incorrect, and the Bible is in fact literally true, etc).
Understanding scientific method require mathematics, and, yes, the very basic of it is algebra.
Then I clicked on his home page.
