Responses to the tragic and allegedly race-based murder of Lt. Richard Collins at the University of Maryland have been overwhelmingly supportive — but as a new article in Patheos points out, there’s already evidence that some right-wingers are twisting it for their own benefit.

According to David Whitney, a conservative pastor associated with the right-wing Institute on the Constitution think tank, Collins’ murder by a white man name Sean Urbanski was due to evolution being taught in schools. Whitney claimed that Collins was a Christian, and that Urbanski is a “secular humanist,” though there is no evidence to support that claim.

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Urbanski, Whitney argued, was the victim of a public school education that taught evolution instead of creationism — teachings that the pastor claims “taught that mankind, including himself, was nothing more than a long compilation of mistakes and mutations and chance occurrences.”

“We should not be surprised then if Sean, with that background and education, concluded that life is meaningless, without any purpose at all,” Whitney continued. “Survival of the fittest therefore has some rather dastardly consequences which we see in the murder committed by a secular humanist of a Christian young man.”

“Evolution is also the basis of racism, and many assert that racism played a role in the motivation for this murder,” Whitney said in the clip posted by Right Wing Watch. “You see, evolution is essentially racist. So where did Sean Urbanski learn racism? He learned it in his classes on evolution at the local public high school that his parents sent him to and his parents funded that school by the payment of their property taxes.”

Watch the pastor’s bizarre remarks about evolution causing racism and murder below, via Right Wing Watch.