If I had to guess what's driving this, it'd be a mixture of:
1) ascendancy of a more "movement conservative" wing of the Republican party, displacing the more pro-science business-and-defense establishment; and
2) the ideologically objectionable area has expanded from evolution to include stem cells and climate change, and once you get to three different things you have a list, and then people start perceiving it as a pattern.
I must say that I was pretty surprised at some of the open attacks on science, though, like the calls to cut the NSF's budget, and people like Eric Cantor going on TV to attack specific computer scientists by name (while misrepresenting their research). I didn't realize that the National Science Foundation now has the status of something like NPR among the conservative base.