I’ve started calling religious people “illiterate.” technically, they are scientifically illiterate, correct?

No. Not correct. You’re conflating two different things and assuming a religious belief of some type is equivalent to scientific illiteracy. It does seem rather strange to call people like Newton and Dobzhansky scientifically illiterate as well as modern day folks like Francis Collins and Kenneth Miller. There may be other things you may wish to label* them with, but scientifically illiterate is not right.

*Labeling others can lead to problems in that it leads to lazy thinking–rather than take each case individually, just slap a label on them and you don’t need to do much more thinking about it. Respectfully, I believe this is what you’ve done here by labeling them scientifically illiterate.

I do wonder how we can get these signals (evolution and global warming) changed in the party. I know that as signals they don’t matter too much. (And evolution is primarily an issue at the state level) Personally I blame Al Gore for a lot of this. Before Gore did his campaign to raise awareness of global warming it wasn’t nearly the signal it is today. (And ironically Rick Perry at the time was Gore’s state campaign director in Texas as I recall)

* I recently had an email exchange with an intelligent, well-educated conservative friend of mine and I mentioned in passing I wasn’t too pleased with Rick Perry’s appointing creationists to the Texas school board. He replied with something along the lines of “Well, I don’t have a problem with evolution, but I don’t see any problem with teaching both sides.” Like many people, the guy’s got kids, a career, no background in science, doesn’t read Discover blogs, etc and isn’t about to invest the considerable time and effort needed to form a coherent, rational view of what to think about all this.
* My dad is a scientist, and a very good one at that. He’s also a staunch conservative. Around the time “Expelled” came out, he made some comment expressing possible interest in it. I informed him what a loan of b.s. it was of course, and he came around, but the point is that biology may as well be a foreign country to him. Now, if Ben Stein had been saying that, say, covalent bonding is a myth and only Nazis believed in covalent bonding, my dad would have instantly dismissed him as a crank. But biology? Meh–he’ll go with the flow on that one.

Some people are open to reason on this, especially if they haven’t thought about it much. As for the rest, I don’t know.