Cross-posted at my little
spot in blogoland
ID violates the establishment clause.
Not even close
"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy," Jones wrote. "It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."
More when the full text comes available
Full text here (warning-PDF)
Comments are already noting "activist judge" complaints...the judge is one step ahead of you:
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court.
Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which
has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal
maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
More...judge defends idea that one can be faithful and believe in evolution:
The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the
Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious,
antecedents.
Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the
scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.
Like I said...not even close
Update [2005-12-20 11:41:39 by MLDB]:Judge notes how RR brought us to this point.
As we previously noted, the legal landscape radically changed in 1968 when the Supreme Court struck down Arkansas’s statutory prohibition against teaching evolution in Epperson. 393 U.S. 97. Although the Arkansas statute at issue did not include direct references to the Book of Genesis or to the fundamentalist view
that religion should be protected from science, the Supreme Court concluded that “the motivation of the [Arkansas] law was the same . . . : to suppress the teaching of a theory which, it was thought, ‘denied’ the divine creation of man.” Edwards, 482 U.S. at 590 (quoting Epperson, 393 U.S. at 109) (Arkansas sought to prevent its teachers from discussing the theory of evolution as it is contrary to the belief of
some regarding the Book of Genesis.).
Post-Epperson, evolution’s religious opponents implemented “balanced treatment” [Ed. Note Early Fox News?]statutes requiring public school teachers who taught evolution to devote equal time to teaching the biblical view of creation; however, such statutes did not pass constitutional muster under the Establishment Clause. See, e.g., Daniel, 515
F.2d at 487, 489, 491. In Daniel, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that by assigning a “preferential position for the Biblical version of creation” over “any account of the development of man based on scientific research and reasoning,” the challenged statute officially promoted religion, in violation of the Establishment
Clause. Id. at 489.
Next, and as stated, religious opponents of evolution began cloaking religious beliefs in scientific sounding language and then mandating that schools teach the resulting “creation science” or “scientific creationism” as an alternative to evolution. However, this tactic was likewise unsuccessful under the First Amendment. “Fundamentalist organizations were formed to promote the idea that
the Book of Genesis was supported by scientific data. The terms ‘creation science’ and ‘scientific creationism’ have been adopted by these Fundamentalists as descriptive of their study of creation and the origins of man.” McLean, 529 F.Supp. at 1259. In 1982, the district court in McLean reviewed Arkansas’s balanced-treatment law and evaluated creation science in light of Scopes, Epperson, and the long history of Fundamentalism’s attack on the scientific theory
of evolution, as well as the statute’s legislative history and historical context. The court found that creation science organizations were fundamentalist religious
entities that “consider[ed] the introduction of creation science into the public schools part of their ministry.” Id. at 1260. The court in McLean stated that creation science rested on a “contrived dualism” that recognized only two possible explanations for life, the scientific theory of evolution and biblical creationism, treated the two as mutually exclusive such that “one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution,” and accordingly viewed any critiques of evolution as evidence that necessarily
supported biblical creationism. Id. at 1266. The court concluded that creation science “is simply not science” because it depends upon “supernatural intervention,” which cannot be explained by natural causes, or be proven through
empirical investigation, and is therefore neither testable nor falsifiable. Id. at 1267. Accordingly, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas deemed creation science as merely biblical creationism in a new guise and held that Arkansas’ balanced-treatment statute could have no valid secular purpose or effect, served only to advance religion, and violated the First Amendment. Id. at 1264, 1272-74.