The new Monkey Trial

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.

By Michelle Goldberg

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.

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2005/01/10/evolution/index.html

from the people who threw out Harris Wofford and replace him with :evilfrown: Rickie Santorum :evilfrown: (a real jerk - I lived in his Congressional District), and almost replaced Specter (in the primary) with :evilfrown: Pat Toomey :evilfrown: - another real jerk.

And then there was Pittsburgh that shot itself in the arse with Pete :dunce:Flaherty.

It's not the Pennsylvania where I was born and grew up - that's for sure

I'm not christian and even i'm offended by that!

It was joyously swaying back and forth in the wind. If Jesus had been on it, he'd have fallen off and been run over.

People are looking at me sideways here at work.

how would they like it if we tried to get Darwinism taught during Sunday School? If you want fairy tales get 'em somewhere else besides EDUCATION. Go to freaking church.

but they also lack any respect whatsoever for the law.

I hope the ACLU bankrupts the district over this. Maybe that will send a message to other communities who want to impose fundamentalist nonsense in their public school's curricula.

we are devo.

devo = de-evolution.

Turns out they had it right all along. :+


Really, though, this is so disturbing, and it seems to be spreading. Mixing religion with science will set scientific thought back about 700 years, literally.

What they seek is a return to the 'Demonic' perspective, that is a worldview that is dominated by prostration to god, and all science and art reflect that. This was the worldview held prior to the Age of Enlightenment, that occurred after the Medieval Age.

From the article...

"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."


She's equating average people who want their children to be taught science to terrorists and of coarse, taking Shrubs lead and using 9.11 for that purpose whenever they can...this makes me sick to my stomach.........literally.

The only thing we can hope for is that whenever these ignoramuses have tried to suppress science because it contradicts their superstitions, they usually come out losing more ground than they previously had....hopefully that trend will continue and science and reason will win out in the end.

“We believe that reading the (‘intelligent design’) statement violates our responsibility as educators as set forth in the code,” Miller said. “Students are allowed to opt out from hearing the statement. We should be allowed to opt out from reading it.”


All but one teacher in the Dover Area School District’s high school science department signed a letter Thursday requesting that they be allowed to “opt out” of reading the “Intelligent Design Theory” statement meant for students.
“We do not believe this is science,” said high school science teacher Jen Miller.

The statement is to be read on Jan. 13, the same day evolution is to be discussed in class.

http://ydr.com/story/main/54594/

Let's put this into context.

How many other fields of science are being battered by external uninformed kibitzers to present something that the vast (and I mean truly vast) majority of the professionals working in that field disagree with. Think about it- these morons want to overrule the informed opinions of the people who have spent their lives studying and learning science, so that they can make truly expert analyses.

I am a professional scientist, and I work in computational biology, and I can tell you that in our world, there is no debate on the validity of evolution. (In contrast there are wonderfully vitriolic arguments on the details and mechanisms of evolution, but that's a very different matter.)

In short, no one who argues for intelligent design will be taken seriously in the research community. Peer review is not a perfect system, and there are always possibilities that it's wrong, but in general it's a good, solid system. And you can believe me, evolution has passed peer review, and ID/creationism/voodoo don't even get in the door.