But as an elected official, your job impacts scientific research much more than a civil engineer would.

The government is one of the largest sources of funding for research and one of the very few large sources of funding outside the private sector. In my experience, academic research supported by private industry simply doesn't work. There's so much research out there that is extremely important scientifically that would have a hard time being funded by private industries because the research itself is financially unviable. It's why government funding is so crucial to research.

A lot of this government funding (through the NIH, NIS, DoD, NASA, DARPA, etc) is directly controlled by elected officials. Congressmen and the President get to dictate how much funding each one of these organization gets and even what the funding can and cannot be used for. Back during the Bush presidency for example (the exact years escape me), there was a ban on using federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, and Bush vetoed a bill that would have allowed for funding using excess embryos left over from in vitro fertilization.

For me, it's not too far fetched to see the same sort of bans applied to political hot topic areas of research. I wouldn't be surprised if this Congress pushed for a ban of using federal funding on climate change research, for example.

So for me, I really don't care about a civil engineer being scientifically literate because all his job really impacts are the people he works for and whoever uses his buildings. Elected officials on the other hand impact almost every scientist in the country. I don't expect Ron Paul or any other elected official to be able to actually know anything about evolution, but I do expect them to at least think using scientific data and not reject an established scientific theory simply because of their religious beliefs or the fact that their definition of "theory" differs from the scientific meaning.