Did Dover Care About Taxpayer Money? A Response to Critics.

Seth Cooper and Joe Manzari’s article, “ACLU Demands and Dover Designs,” raised fresh questions about the potential for a dismissal of the Kitzmiller case based upon mootness, potentially allowing the Dover Area School Board to avoid a large attorneys’ fees judgment against them by rescinding their intelligent design (ID) policy before Judge Jones issued his decision. Opponents of intelligent design responded harshly to the AEI article (and my own reporting) by questioning the legal reasoning about mootness. One critic stated that the AEI article, and my commentary, “appear to be utterly ignorant of the voluntary cessation doctrine” and “there was virtually no chance that the case would be mooted.” Yet several Supreme Court cases dealing with mootness and a careful Read More ›

Bowman Law Review Makes Good Points but Article Misunderstands ID

Legal commentary mentioning the Kitzmiller decision is now starting to appear in legal journals. In the Spring, 2006 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, one of the most widely circulated law journals, the lead article addresses intelligent design, Kitzmiller, and the establishment clause. Cristi L. Bowman’s article, “Seeing Government Purpose Through the Objective Observer’s Eyes: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Debates,” is available here. Most of the article is about establishment clause jurisprudence, and an argument against part of McCreary County v. ACLU. Bowman argues that the government purpose prong of the Lemon test should return to focusing on “actual intent,” rather than trying to evaluate government purpose with an “objective observer.” Kitzmiller and the evolution-intelligent design controversy Read More ›

Attempts to Misconstrue Intelligent Design in Kentucky Fail

In the most recent news about the controversy about intelligent design in Kentucky, the Lexington Herald-Ledger‘s Political Notebook reports on the nomination of Kentucky’s State Board of Education candidates. Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher took heat for speaking favorably about teaching intelligent design just before Judge Jones’ Kitzmiller decision was issued. The Governor had mentioned intelligent design in his State of the Commonwealth address in January, 2006 and then in February sent a letter about teaching intelligent design to the Kentucky Academy of Sciences. (The letter was in response to the Academy’s December vote to reject any teaching about intelligent design.)After the Kitzmiller decision struck down the Dover Area School Board’s intelligent design policy, some states, such as Ohio, began retreating Read More ›

Crisis Magazine Reviews American Museum of Natural History

The April, 2006 edition of Crisis Magazine features a critical review of the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. George S. Johnson’s article, “An Evening with Darwin in New York,” is a thoughtful analysis of the museum content mixed with general criticism of the Darwinian orthodoxy. The article walks through the museum in broad brush strokes while taking note of the stories about Darwinian evolution not told by the exhibit. The review starts with the exhibits treatment of fossils, and features extended notes from Niles Eldredge, and many paleontologists who find the fossil record somewhat lacking as evidence for Darwin. Not surprisingly, the criticisms of these paleontologists, all mainstream secular scientists, were left out of the display.

Did the ACLU Squeeze the Intelligent Design Decision out of Dover?

The taxpayers in Dover Pennsylvania may have been fleeced by the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AUSCS) for a shocking $1 million dollar bill. Joe Manzari and Seth Cooper’s article today in The American Enterprise Institute Online brings this dirty little secret into the public light. A few months ago when the ACLU announced that they “generously” would only demand $1 million in attorneys fees for the Kitzmiller case, the casual observer probably thought nothing of it. However, once the facts are examined, as Manzari and Cooper nicely lay out, the attorneys fees collected by the ACLU are not merely the cost of losing a lawsuit, but rather look much more like a fat taxpayer Read More ›