| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
12 Jan 2005 05:35:06 AM |
| Object: |
More Creationist kooks |
The New Monkey Trial
By Michelle Goldberg
Salon.com
Monday 10 January 2005
By persuading the Dover, Pa., school board to teach creationism,
Christian zealots have provoked a showdown over the status of not just
evolutionary theory, but science itself.
Dover, Pa. - It was an ordinary springtime school board meeting in
the bedroom community of Dover, Pa. The high school needed new biology
textbooks, and the science department had recommended Kenneth Miller
and Joseph Levine's "Biology." "It was a fantastic text," said Carol
"Casey" Brown, 57, a self-described Goldwater Republican and the
board's senior member. "It just followed our curriculum so
beautifully."
But Bill Buckingham, a new board member who'd recently become
chair of the curriculum committee, had an objection. "Biology," he
said, was "laced with Darwinism." He wanted a book that balanced
theories of evolution with Christian creationism, and he was willing
to turn his town into a cultural battlefield to get it.
"This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution,"
Buckingham, a stocky, gray-haired man who wears a red, white and blue
crucifix pin on his lapel, said at the meeting. "This country was
founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such."
Casey Brown and her husband, fellow board member Jeff Brown, were
stunned. "I was picturing the headlines," Jeff said months later.
"And we got them," Casey added.
Indeed, by the end of 2004, journalists from across the country
and from overseas had come to Dover to report on the latest outbreak
of America's perennial war over evolution. By then, Buckingham had
succeeded in making Dover the first school district in the country to
mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" - an updated version of
creationism couched in modern biological terms. In doing so, he
ushered in a legal challenge from outraged parents and the ACLU that
could turn into a 21st century version of the infamous "Scopes Monkey
Trial."
The Dover case is part of a renewed revolt against evolutionary
science that's been gathering force in America for the past four
years, a symptom of the same renascent fundamentalism that helped
propel George Bush to victory. Since 2001, the National Center for
Science Education, a group formed to defend the teaching of evolution,
has tallied battles over evolution in 43 states, noting they're
growing more frequent.
After 1987, when the Supreme Court declared the teaching of
creationism in public school unconstitutional in Edwards vs.
Aguillard, the doctrine seemed to be shut out of public schools once
and for all. In the last few years, though, intelligent design has
given evolution's opponents new hope. Now, emboldened by their growing
political power, religious conservatives are once again storming the
barricades of science education.
The same month Bush was reelected, the rural Grantsburg, Wis.,
school district revised its curriculum to allow the teaching of
creationism and intelligent design. After a community outcry -
including a letter of protest from 200 Wisconsin clergy - the district
revised the policy but continued to mandate that students be taught
"the scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory," a
common creationist tactic that fosters the illusion that evolution is
a controversial theory among scientists.
Other anti-evolution initiatives have affected entire states. In
the November election, creationists took over the Kansas Board of
Education. The last time the board had a majority, in 1999, it voted
to erase any mention of evolution from the state curriculum. Kansas
became a laughingstock and the anti-evolutionists were defeated in the
next Republican primary, leading to the policy's reversal. Now, newly
victorious, the anti-evolutionists plan to introduce the teaching of
intelligent design next year.
Similarly, this past December, the New York Times reported that
Missouri legislators plan to introduce a bill that would require state
biology textbooks to include at least one chapter dealing with
"alternative theories to evolution." Speaking to the Times, state Rep.
Cynthia Davis seemed to compare opponents of intelligent design to
al-Qaida. "It's like when the hijackers took over those four planes on
Sept. 11 and took people to a place where they didn't want to go," she
said. "I think a lot of people feel that liberals have taken our
country somewhere we don't want to go. I think a lot more people
realize this is our country and we're going to take it back."
Right-wingers in Congress, on talk radio and on cable TV, are
stoking the anti-evolution rebellion, insisting that academic freedom
means the freedom to teach creationism. Having shown their strength in
the election, cultural conservatives aren't in the mood to compromise.
America is a democracy and they have the numbers. They see no reason
why the principles of science shouldn't be up for popular vote.
On Dec. 14, the ACLU announced that it was representing 11 Dover
parents in a lawsuit against the town. The school board's
intelligent-design policy, their complaint said, had violated the
First Amendment's Establishment Clause, "which prohibits the teaching
or presentation of religious ideas in public school science classes."
That day, a few of the parents joined their attorneys for a press
conference in the rotunda of Pennsylvania's capitol in Harrisburg.
Reporters and cameramen crowded around the microphone as a succession
of lawyers, liberal clergymen and scientists spoke. The Rev. Barry
Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church
and State, came from D.C. for the event. "We've been battling this
from Hawaii to California to New Hampshire to Cobb County," he said,
referring to the suburban Atlanta school district that had recently
put warning stickers on its biology textbooks calling evolution "a
theory, not a fact."
As the cameras rolled, a few protesters tried to edge their way
into the frame. A man named Carl Jarboe, in a purple sport coat and a
fur hat, stood near the parents holding a fluorescent green sign
saying, "ACLU Censors Truth." His wife, wearing a kerchief on her head
and small round glasses, held a similar sign saying "Evolution:
Unscientific and Untrue. Why Does the ACLU Oppose Schools Giving All
the Evidence?"
The parents ignored them. Most were hesitant in front of all the
cameras. They weren't culture warriors and they didn't speak in
ideological terms. Instead, they talked about what Buckingham and the
other creationists were doing to their school and their community.
"We don't believe that intelligent design is science, and we have
faith in ourselves as parents that we can do a good job teaching our
children about religion," Christy Rehm, a 31-year-old mother of four,
said after the conference. "We have faith in our pastor, we have faith
in our community that our children are going to be raised to be decent
people. So we don't feel that it's the school board's job to make that
decision for our children."
Jarboe, who introduced himself as a former assistant professor of
chemistry at Messiah College, a nearby Christian school, was convinced
that the parents were being used by the ACLU to further its sinister
agenda. Like a great many members of the Christian right, he sees the
ACLU as a subversive, possibly demonic institution. Quoting James
Kennedy, an influential Fort Lauderdale televangelist, he called the
ACLU the "American Communist United League." "I maintain it's a
communist front," he said.
He then pressed a flier into my hand from a two-day creation
seminar he'd attended at the Faith Baptist Church in Lebanon, Pa. It
was run by Dr. Kent Hovind, a young-Earth creationist who argues that,
as the flier said, "it has been proven that man lived at the same time
as dinosaurs." To underline this point, Hovind runs Dinosaur Adventure
Land, a theme park in Pensacola, Fla., with rides and exhibits about
the not-so-long-ago days when humans and dinosaurs roamed the planet
together.
A few feet from Jarboe stood Robert Eckhardt, a professor of
developmental genetics and evolutionary morphology at Penn State.
Eckhardt had spoken at the press conference about the central role of
evolution in biology. "The idea that intelligent design is a powerful
upwelling of controversy within the scientific community is absolute
nonsense," he said. Jarboe was unfazed by Eckhardt's expertise; he
called him a "screaming leftist unbiblical liberal."
A wry man with a lined face, tweed jacket and owlish glasses,
Eckhardt, like most other experts in his field, has been dealing with
creationists throughout his career and finds it tiresome to try to
reason with them. He divided his opponents into several categories.
"There are people who just feel that the world is changing very
rapidly around them. Their children are coming home from school with
ideas that are taught to them in biology class, the parents find this
to be challenging and upsetting, and by God they're going to do
something about it," he said. "They don't understand the world and
they're trying to get the world to slow down and accommodate their
thinking."
The second group, he said, are people "who are formerly associated
with the creationist movement, who purposely misrepresent issues of
science when in fact they are issues of religion." He didn't want to
name names but it seemed he was speaking of the fellows at the
Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, headquarters of
the intelligent-design movement. The third, he said, rolling his eyes
a tiny bit toward Jarboe, who was listening to our conversation, "are
people who are mentally unbalanced and who are so threatened by this
that they perceive things going on around them that never happened."
As Eckhardt spoke, Jim Grove, the pastor of Heritage Baptist
Church, a small congregation near Dover, stepped forward to challenge
him to a debate. Eckhardt refused with a derisive laugh, saying, "I
value my time." Grove interpreted this as a sign of evolution's
weakness. "If he has facts, what about a forum to present them in
public?" he asked. "It would be a perfect opportunity. If he has the
facts."
Of Eckhardt's three categories of anti-evolutionists, the second -
the proponents of intelligent design - are currently the most
influential. They've created the terms that now dominate the debate
from the halls of Congress to local school boards like Dover. They're
the reason that, after a decade when the consensus on evolution in
education seemed secure, Darwin's enemies are on the move.
Although Buckingham first argued for teaching creationism in Dover
biology classes, he soon started using the phrase "intelligent design"
instead. The change in language was significant because intelligent
design was created in part to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling that
made it illegal for public schools to teach creationism. Masquerading
as a science, it aims to convince the public that evolution is a
theory under fire within the scientific community and doesn't deserve
its preeminent place in the biology curriculum.
At Dover's June 14 school board meeting, Buckingham said he wanted
the board to consider the intelligent-design textbook, "Of Pandas and
People: The Central Question of Biological Origin." According to Nick
Matzke, a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education, the
original version of "Of Pandas and People," published in 1989,
contained one of the first uses of the phrase "intelligent design."
Later, in the 1990s, the intelligent-design cause was taken up by the
Center for Science and Culture.
Yet "Of Pandas and People" was never meant to be scientific. It
was a strategic response to the Supreme Court's 1987 ruling in Edwards
vs. Aguillard, which overturned a Louisiana law mandating that
"creation science" be taught alongside evolution. Because the court
ruled that "creation science" is a religious doctrine, savvy opponents
of evolution sought to recast the central tenets of creationism in a
way that hid their religious inspiration. Thus intelligent design was
born.
Percival Davis, one of the coauthors of "Of Pandas and People,"
also co-wrote the old-school creationist text, "A Case for Creation."
An online ad for "Pandas" on the Web site of the creationist group
Answers in Genesis describes the text as a "superbly written" book for
public schools that "has no Biblical content, yet contains
creationists' interpretations and refutations for evidences [sic]
usually found in standard textbooks supporting evolution!"
The core idea in "Pandas" - and in the intelligent-design movement
generally - is that of "irreducible complexity," the theory that the
structure of proteins and amino acids in cells - the building blocks
of life - is so complex that only a supernatural force could have
choreographed it. "Because of the high level of improbability that
cells could be generated by the random mixing of chemicals, some
scientists believe that the first cells were created from the design
of some outside, intelligent force," the book says.
Indeed, some "scientists" do believe this - the ones who work at
the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Outside the
precincts of the religious right, though, the scientific consensus
about evolution is very close to unanimous. For decades, biologists at
the world's major universities, and in esteemed peer-reviewed
journals, have proven that cellular processes have indeed evolved in
sync with Darwin's theories. In November 2004, National Geographic ran
a cover story asking, "Was Darwin Wrong?" Its subhead provided the
answer: "No. The Evidence for Evolution Is Overwhelming."
"Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's
work of Charles Darwin, is a theory," wrote award-winning science
author David Quammen in National Geographic. "It's a theory about the
origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth's living
creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the
terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you
might even be tempted to say that it's 'just' a theory. In the same
sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is 'just' a theory.
The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa,
offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory ... Each of these theories
is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by
observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as
fact."
A statuesque woman with a strawberry blond bob and crisply proper
diction, Casey Brown isn't a scientist, but she prides herself on
being well read, and after 10 years on the school board, she knows
what a good biology textbook looks like. When she saw "Of Pandas and
People," she was appalled. "It's poor science and worse theology," she
said.
Brown said that by the school board's August meeting, Buckingham
had given up on the idea of using "Pandas" as the main text, but he
insisted that the board buy it as a supplement. Otherwise, he said, he
wouldn't approve the purchase of "Biology."
One of Buckingham's supporters on the board was out sick that
night, and without her, the vote deadlocked, 4-4. Finally, worried
that the school would have to start the year without textbooks, one
member switched her vote and "Biology" was approved. The town's little
drama seemed to be at an end.
In fact, it was just beginning.
Shortly after the motion to have the school board buy "Of Pandas
and People" was defeated, the Dover School District received an
anonymous donation of 50 copies of the book, and Buckingham and his
allies set about figuring out how to integrate them into the
curriculum.
On Oct. 18, the board voted on a resolution written by Buckingham
and his supporters on the board. It said, "Students will be made aware
of gaps/problems in Darwin's theory and of other theories of evolution
including, but not limited to, intelligent design. Note: Origins of
Life is not taught." The "Pandas" books were to be kept in the science
classroom, and teachers were instructed to read a statement referring
students to them.
Casey and Jeff Brown argued against it. "We kept maintaining this
is going to get us into legal trouble," Casey said. "It was a clear
violation." As an alternative, she proposed offering a comparative
world religions elective, which would teach the creation myths of
various faiths.
But Buckingham was determined. "Two thousand years ago, someone
died on a cross," he said at the meeting. "Can't someone take a stand
for him?"
Jeff Brown spoke up in response, saying it was the wrong time and
the wrong place for a religious debate. Buckingham called him a coward
and said it was a good thing that he wasn't fighting the revolutionary
war "because we would still have a queen."
Finally, they voted. The mandate to teach intelligent design
passed 6-3. Casey and Jeff Brown quit the board in protest. The other
dissenter, Noel Wenrich, turned to Buckingham and said, "We lost two
good people because of you."
"And Mr. Buckingham said, with profanity, 'Good riddance to bad
rubbish,'" Casey recalled. "And he called Mr. Wenrich every name in
the book."
Buckingham may have started the Dover crusade himself, but the
Center for Science and Culture laid the groundwork years before. The
group provides the "scientific" and philosophical arguments to bolster
the opponents of evolution in local political struggles.
CSC operates out of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank
that's funded in part by savings and loan heir Howard Ahmanson. As Max
Blumenthal reported in a 2004 Salon article, Ahmanson spent 20 years
on the board of R.J. Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation, a theocratic
outfit that advocates the replacement of American civil law with
biblical law.
The Center for Science and Culture also aims, in a far more
elliptical way, to put God at the center of civic life. Originally
called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, CSC usually
purports to be motivated by science, not religion. At times, though,
it's refreshingly candid about its true goal - a grandiose scheme to
undermine the secular legacy of the Enlightenment and rebuild society
on religious foundations. As it said in a 1999 fundraising proposal
that was later leaked online, "Discovery Institute's Center for the
Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow
of materialism and its cultural legacies."
The proposal was titled "The Wedge Strategy." It began: "The
proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one
of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built ...
Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under
wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern
science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man,
thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud
portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or
machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces
and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending
forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic
conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our
culture, from politics and economics to literature and art."
As "The Wedge Strategy" suggests, many CSC fellows are troubled
more by the philosophical consequences of evolutionary theory than by
the fact that it contradicts a literal reading of the Bible's book of
Genesis. Most of them - though not all - are too scientifically
sophisticated to hew to a young-Earth creationist line like Hovind's.
In mainstream forums, they eschew sectarian religious language. As
seekers of mainstream credibility, they don't want to be associated
with the medieval persecutors of Copernicus and Galileo. Instead, they
try to present themselves as heirs to those very visionaries,
insisting that dogmatic secularists desperate to deny God are
thwarting their open-minded quest for truth.
Most CSC fellows even accept that evolution occurs within
individual species. What they dispute is the idea that random mutation
and natural selection led to the evolution of higher species from
lower ones - of man from apelike ancestors. Such a process seems to
them incompatible with the belief that man was created in the image of
God and that God takes a special interest in him.
Several CSC fellows come with impressive credentials from
prestigious universities, and they know how to argue in mainstream
forums. Philip Johnson, one of the fathers of the movement, is a law
professor at UC-Berkeley. Jonathan Wells, author of the influential
intelligent-design book, "Icons of Evolution," has a Ph.D. in
molecular and cell biology from Berkeley and another in religious
studies from Yale. A member of the Unification Church whose education
was bankrolled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, he's written that he sought
his degrees specifically to fight the teaching of evolution. As he put
it in an article on the Moonie Web site True Parents, "Father's words,
my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life
to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had
already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father [Sun
Myung Moon] chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary
graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the
opportunity to prepare myself for battle."
Armed with advanced degrees, CSC fellows have secured invitations
to testify before state boards of education. They've published opinion
pieces in mainstream newspapers and are regularly consulted for
"balance" in stories about evolution controversies.
They've also found important allies within the Republican Party,
especially Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. Santorum tried to
attach an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act that would
encourage the teaching of intelligent design. It said, "[W]here topics
are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological
evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full
range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate
controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect
society." The statement was eventually adopted as part of a Conference
Report on the law, which means it has advisory power only.
The language sounds innocuous, but Santorum's intent was clear. In
2002, Ohio debated adding intelligent design to its statewide science
standards. In a Washington Times Op-Ed supporting the change, Santorum
quoted his amendment and then wrote, "If the Education Board of Ohio
does not include intelligent design in the new teaching standards,
many students will be denied a first-rate science education. Many will
be left behind."
Santorum has also come out in favor of Dover's policy. The school
board, in turn, distributed copies of one of Santorum's
pro-intelligent design Op-Eds along with the agenda at its Jan. 3
meeting.
Oddly enough, although Santorum is supporting the Dover school
board's policy, the Center for Science and Culture isn't. On Dec. 14,
CSC put out a statement calling Dover's policy "misguided" and saying
it should be "withdrawn and rewritten." The statement quoted CSC's
associate director John West as saying that discussion of intelligent
design shouldn't be prohibited but it also shouldn't be required.
"What should be required is full disclosure of the scientific evidence
for and against Darwin's theory," said West, "which is the approach
supported by the overwhelming majority of the public."
This, of course, is a departure from the position laid out in "The
Wedge Strategy," which specifically calls for the integration of
intelligent design into school curriculum.
Why the change? Matzke, from the National Center for Science
Education, is convinced that the CSC wanted to wait for a better test
case and a friendly Supreme Court, which they'll get if Bush is able
to nominate a few new justices. The Dover policy, Matzke said,
probably won't survive a court challenge right now, and if it's
overturned, the precedent will be a setback for the missionaries of
intelligent design.
"Their current strategy is not to have an intelligent-design
policy passed," Matzke said. "They just want a policy that says
students should analyze the strengths and weakness of evolution." CSC
did not return calls for comment.
It's not hard for creationists to convince the public that the
evidence for evolution is weak. Scientists accept evolution as
something very close to fact, but Americans never have. In a November
2004 CBS News/New York Times poll, about evolution, 55 percent of the
respondents said that God created humans in their present form.
Twenty-seven percent believed in the evolution of man guided by God,
and 13 percent believed in evolution without God.
So it should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans -
65 percent, according to the poll cited above - favor teaching
creationism alongside evolution in public schools. Creationism is the
perfect culture-war issue because it inevitably pits majorities in
local communities against interloping lawyers and scientists. In a
country gripped by right-wing populism, it's not hard to stoke
resentment against scientists who have the gall to think that they
know more than everybody else.
In fact, some historians date the start of our culture wars to
1925, the year of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tenn.
At the time, the battle over evolution had been raging throughout
the country. It came to a head when 24-year-old teacher John Scopes
challenged Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of
evolution in the state's public schools and universities. His
persecution set the stage for a legendary courtroom showdown that pit
celebrated Chicago defense attorney Clarence Darrow against Williams
Jennings Bryan, the crusading populist, fundamentalist and three-time
presidential candidate.
Bryan, the nation's leading anti-evolutionist, made his case in
populist terms. In his 1993 book "The Creationists," historian Ronald
Numbers wrote, "Throughout his political career, Bryan had placed his
faith in the common people, and he resented the attempt of a few
thousand elitist scientists 'to establish an oligarchy over the forty
million American Christians' to dictate what should be taught in the
schools."
Bryan and his fellow Scopes prosecutors won their trial, but the
national mockery that followed it did much to alienate conservative
Christians from secular society, setting the stage for the culture
wars of later decades. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the
Scopes trial, "Summer for the Gods," Edward Larson wrote about the
birth of the right-wing religious counterculture in the wake of the
Pyrrhic victory in Tennessee:
"Indeed, fundamentalism became a byword in American culture as a
result of the Scopes trial, and fundamentalists responded by
withdrawing. They did not abandon their faith, however, but set about
constructing a separate subculture with independent religious,
educational and social institutions."
Eventually, of course, the religious right emerged from its
subculture to renew its attack on secularism. Today, cultural
conservatives are mustering almost exactly the same arguments that
Bryan made in Dayton 80 years ago.
This past December, Republican strategist Jack Burkman appeared on
MSNBC's "Scarborough Country" to back creationism in terms of populist
democracy. "Why should the state and the federal government have a
monopoly on defining what constitutes science?" he asked. "I see no
problem with presenting a creationist view in the schools, given that
70 percent of Americans want that. The law should reflect democratic
desires. It should reflect public desires."
Of course, public desires don't determine the physical facts of
the world. "The best argument that the creationists have got is that
it's only fair to teach both sides," Matzke said. "The problem with
that argument is that science is not a democracy and a lot of times
there aren't two correct sides. There are people who believe that the
sun goes around the earth. They're called geocentrists. That doesn't
mean we should teach that."
In Dover, though, people tend to interpret positions like Matzke's
as elitism. Much of the public seems to desire schools that teach
creationism, although many balk at the cost of a lawsuit. For
defenders of Darwin, the most troubling thing isn't that the Dover
school board is dominated by extremists - it's that the board is, in a
local context, fairly mainstream. Supporters of evolution are the ones
who stand out. Resentment of the ACLU runs high even among some who
opposed the school board's intelligent-design policy. Most opposition
to the policy comes from worry over the cost of the lawsuit.
Most people in Dover say that the town is split fairly evenly over
the school board's intelligent-design policy. The division isn't one
of principle, though. People know that the ACLU's lawsuit is going to
be expensive and are worried that defending the policy in court will
drain the school budget and force a tax increase.
"I would say that people who are against what the school board is
doing in principle are a minority, a great minority," former school
board member Noel Wenrich told me. "However, when it comes to spending
money on it, it's a whole other issue. When you ask people, Do you
support the board's decision on this? they say yes." Ask them if
they're willing to pay more taxes to finance a court case, though, and
they'll give you a resounding no, he said. "It's a money issue."
The school board doesn't need to worry about most of its legal
fees, however. It's being represented pro bono by the Thomas More Law
Center, a right-wing Catholic firm that describes itself as "the sword
and shield for people of faith." Wenrich told me that Thomas More
lawyers had been advising Buckingham for months.
Despite the law firm's help, though, the lawsuit will likely be
financially devastating to the district, the second poorest in the
county. Dover would have to pay for lost wages of people called to
testify, and it would have to provide outside counsel for some
witnesses, like the Browns, who don't want Thomas More representing
them. Jeff Brown guessed that depositions alone would cost the
district $30,000. Then, if Dover loses, federal civil rights law would
make it liable for the ACLU's legal fees. "It won't be cheap," said
Witold Walczak, the ACLU's Pennsylvania legal director.
"It will kill us," said Casey Brown. In fact, Dover is already
broke. The board had just been forced to cut its library budget almost
in half, from $68,000 to $38,000, and to eliminate all field trips.
Wenrich himself, a 36-year-old Army veteran and father of two,
doesn't believe in evolution. But he felt honor-bound to put his duty
to the school above his personal politics. "If it were my money, I'd
have no problem," he said. "I'd go out and fight it. But to use the
public's money that's supposed to be educating our kids is absolutely
irresponsible. They're already looking at putting off buying
textbooks, not buying library books, not updating computer equipment.
When we're looking at those budget cuts, it's irresponsible to go out
and pick a fight with the Supreme Court."
If Wenrich is angry with Buckingham, though, he's even angrier at
the outside forces that are challenging the school district. "It is
going full circle now from the religious community ruling what can be
thought - that's what they tried to do in the Middle Ages," he said.
"We've come down to the scientific community trying to tell us what we
can think. Basically what the scientific community currently is doing
is saying, 'You'll have no god before mine. Mine happens to be
Darwin.' Any other thought will not be tolerated."
Evolution's allies might win the battle for Dover's biology
classes, but they're losing America.
.
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| User: "Family Man" |
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| Title: Re: More Creationist kooks |
12 Jan 2005 03:33:11 PM |
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"Fredric L. Rice" <frice@skeptictank.orgREMOVE> wrote in message
news:41e4b701.4841381@news.linkline.com...
The New Monkey Trial
By Michelle Goldberg
Salon.com
Monday 10 January 2005
By persuading the Dover, Pa., school board to teach creationism,
Christian zealots have provoked a showdown over the status of not just
evolutionary theory, but science itself.
Dover, Pa. - It was an ordinary springtime school board meeting in
the bedroom community of Dover, Pa. The high school needed new biology
textbooks, and the science department had recommended Kenneth Miller
and Joseph Levine's "Biology." "It was a fantastic text," said Carol
"Casey" Brown, 57, a self-described Goldwater Republican and the
board's senior member. "It just followed our curriculum so
beautifully."
But Bill Buckingham, a new board member who'd recently become
chair of the curriculum committee, had an objection. "Biology," he
said, was "laced with Darwinism." He wanted a book that balanced
theories of evolution with Christian creationism, and he was willing
to turn his town into a cultural battlefield to get it.
"This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution,"
Buckingham, a stocky, gray-haired man who wears a red, white and blue
crucifix pin on his lapel, said at the meeting. "This country was
founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such."
Mr. Buckingham should be promptly deported to Iran.
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| User: "The Last Liberal / ShyDavid / Desertphile" |
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| Title: Re: More Creationist kooks |
12 Jan 2005 05:06:22 PM |
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On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 05:35:06 GMT, frice@skeptictank.orgREMOVE
(Fredric L. Rice) wrote:
The New Monkey Trial
By Michelle Goldberg
Salon.com
Monday 10 January 2005
By persuading the Dover, Pa., school board to teach creationism,
Christian zealots have provoked a showdown over the status of not just
evolutionary theory, but science itself.
Goddamned savages. We live in the 21st century, not the 12th!
Creationists are evil minions of darkness and ignorance.
---
http://lastliberal.org
In reference to my reading comprehension, is not your mother-inlaw
your mother? or your father-inlaw your father? You're splitting
hairs. - Gary Hall
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