The judge in the Intelligent Design case has ruled, if you haven't heard already. This is a Republican judge with some political aspirations, who will clearly have to answer to the religious Right if he plans to run for office. And even he says that ID is just Creationism under another name, and that they will have to do a hell of a lot more before they could qualify themselves as promoting a scientific view (quote exerpts pilfered from pharyngula.org):
First, while encouraging students to keep an open mind and explore alternatives to evolution, [the policy] offers no scientific alternative; instead, the only alternative offered is an inherently religious one, namely, ID.
Whether a student accepts the Board's invitation to explore Pandas, and reads a creationist text....that objective student can reasonably infer that the District"s favored view is a religious one, and that the District is accordingly sponsoring a form of religion.
To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. 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.
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.
The lies in question were:
- The "anonymous" donor of a set of ID textbooks was a father of a pro-ID board member, and his role was something of an open secret among the ID proponents.
- The publishers of said books had merely replaced the words "Creation Science" in an earlier edition with "Intelligent Design" in the recent one. All the while they maintained that ID was emphatically not Creationism.
So it's official...a judge with a political motive to be on the ID proponents' side was so disgusted with them that he called them wrong, called them liars, and called them inane in a legal opinion. You now have permission to call them liars, and they can't even claim you're running a smear campaign, since it's a matter of public record—they're indeed liars.
Victories don't come much better than that.
Of course, he has already been branded an "activist judge" by those who disagree.
"Activist judge": it's a codeword for "judges who make decisions we don't like".
Posted by: clipdude | December 20, 2005 at 10:27 PM