Tag: law
Scopes v. State: A Lawsuit from a Bygone Era Where Evolutionists were the Persecuted, Not the Persecutors
Introduction: Scopes v. State is probably the most famous court case in the history of the evolution controversy. It’s most well known because a play, Inherit the Wind, was turned into a movie based loosely upon the trial, and has been shown in countless college and high school classrooms promoting a stereotype that Darwin-skeptics are ignorant, close-minded, intolerant ignoramuses. Ironically, today it’s the evolutionists who behave like the fundamentalists in the Scopes trial, holding all the power and banning viewpoints they don’t like. 1. Summary In 1925, teacher John T. Scopes was convicted under the recently adopted Tennessee “Monkey Law” that had criminalized the teaching of evolution.10 In Scopes’s defense, attorneys working with the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) argued Read More ›
New Law Review Article Surveys Case Law on Teaching Evolution
In May, pro-Darwin-only education advocates issued a press release lamenting that “25 percent of biology teachers do not know it is unconstitutional to teach creationism.” Then last month the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) publicized its new “Creationism and the Law” web page, which states that “Since 1968…, U.S. courts have consistently held that ‘creationism’ is a particular religious viewpoint and that teaching it in public schools would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution.” While these statements are legally correct, they leave out a crucial point of law that the NCSE may not wish to publicize: “scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories [may] be taught provided that such curricula are enacted with the clear secular intent of enhancing Read More ›
Testing Your Knowledge of the Louisiana Science Education Act
Q: Who wrote this? The new bill doesn’t mention either creationism or its close cousin, intelligent design. It explicitly disavows any intent to promote a religious doctrine. It doesn’t try to ban Darwin from the classroom or order schools to do anything. It simply requires the state board of education, if asked by local school districts, to help create an environment that promotes “critical thinking” and “objective discussion” about not only evolution and the origins of life but also about global warming and human cloning, two other bêtes noires of the right. Teachers would be required to teach the standard textbook but could use supplementary materials to critique it.
More Dirt from Derb
NRO‘s John Derbyshire has another bombastic blog post (“Governor Jindal, Veto This Bill!“), this time decrying the Louisiana Science Education Act. According to Derb, “The act opens the door to the teaching of creationism in Louisiana public schools.” Of course, this is patently absurd. The bill says that students should be able to critically analyze scientific evidence regarding evolution, global warming, and human cloning; and secondly the bill says it should not be construed to promote religion (bear in mind that SCOTUS deemed creationism “religious” in 1987). This bill is about scientific evidence, whatever there may be, pro and con. No more no less. Attempting to scare the promoters of this bill (which, BTW, just passed the LA House 94-3, Read More ›
None Dare Call it Journalism
Whether the Times will discover the full scope of the threat is uncertain. No one at the Times has yet noticed, for example, that if you play the movie’s interview with Richard Dawkins backward, you can hear Ben Stein saying, “Bill Dembski is dead”