Day By Day

Friday, October 07, 2005

Intelligent Design Trial Update

Testimony resumed Wednesday in the Dover Intelligent Design trial.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reprised some previous testimony and shows how it fits into the plaintiffs' case:

When former Dover school board member Carol Brown took the stand last week in a federal trial over a change in how evolution is taught, she likened the board's public meetings to "tent revivals," complete with fire-and-brimstone Scripture-quoting and a chorus of "amens."

Brown was the seventh witness to testify that the school board had repeatedly used religious references in discussing policy long before it approved the change last year promoting alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution.

Lawyers say the testimony supports the plaintiffs' argument that the board showed religious intent with the new policy and in doing so violated the Constitution.
....

Witold Walczak, legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said the board's actions do not hold up under the so-called Lemon test, outlined by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.

Ann McLean Massie, a professor of law at Washington and Lee University, said the Lemon test has set a "very solid precedent" for constitutional challenges on religious grounds.

"The Lemon test is the most definitive," she said, because it asks whether something has a "valid secular purpose and that its effect neither advances or inhibits religion."

The decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman overturned a Pennsylvania statute providing financial aid to church-related schools. In its opinion, the court laid out a multipronged test examining the "purpose" and "effect" of actions challenged under the "establishment clause" of the First Amendment, which prevents the government from passing legislation establishing a religion.

The test has been applied many times in similar constitutional cases involving religion, including the two landmark Supreme Court cases in the last 25 years that struck down the teaching of creationism, and most recently in Georgia, where a federal judge ruled in January that schools in Cobb County had to remove stickers on science textbooks saying that "evolution is a theory, not a fact."

Walczak said the issue of motivation is "one of the ways" he feels the plaintiffs can win the case. "The purpose and effect are equally strong," he said of the board's actions.

Walczak also cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case earlier this year over the posting of the Ten Commandments in courthouses in Kentucky that supports the plaintiffs' case in Dover.

In McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky, the high court upheld a lower court order that the county remove the Ten Commandments display from courthouse walls because the "predominant purpose for the displays was religious."

"Those cases turned on motivation," said Carl Tobias, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Richmond.

So that's the line of attack -- to try to show that the members of the school board had overt religious intentions in mandating that a statement on Intelligent Design be read in the classroom. That's why we have such over-the-top testimony as to the nature of proceedings at the Dover School Board. Interesting.

Read it here.

In this vein the Plaintiffs introduced testimony from Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeast Louisiana University, to the effect that the materials to which students are referred to learn more about Intelligent Design are part of a "wedge strategy" devised by creationists in the 1990's to gain publicity and legitimacy in the public mind for creationist principles.

For the testimony and a discussion of "wedge strategy" see here.

To verify the reported religious atmosphere of Dover School Board meetings, two part-time reporters who covered the meetings have been called to testify, but they have refused citing a need for journalistic independence. The York Daily Record reports:

[T]wo part-time correspondents for York County newspapers were ready to get locked up to protect the principle of journalistic independence. Joe Maldonado of the York Daily Record/Sunday News and Heidi Bernhard-Bubb of The York Dispatch were threatened with contempt of court if they refused to testify in the federal trial now under way in the Dover “intelligent design” case.

Maldonado and Bernhard-Bubb covered the Dover school board during discussions of requiring that intelligent design (the idea that life is too complex to have evolved randomly) be taught along with evolution.

Board members have denied they sought to advance religion in science classes, and deny or say they can’t remember making statements to the contrary. The correspondents were subpoenaed by the parents challenging the intelligent design requirement to testify about the meetings.

It’s not that the correspondents have anything to hide. Under a judge’s order this week, they are willing to stand by their stories in open court.

But the correspondents and their newspapers feared more wide-ranging questions could forever compromise their ability to cover the case.

As a matter of principle, newspapers regularly fight subpoenas because we can’t afford to be seen as taking one side or the other in civil court cases. And in criminal cases, we don’t want to be perceived as agents of the police and prosecutors on whom the public expects us to keep a watchful eye.

It’s a principled position the public often misunderstands. But we believe that to serve the public, we must protect our independence.

Read it here.

Curiouser and curiouser. Now we are getting into the completely different questions of press freedoms.

On Thursday testimony centered on the question of whether the Dover science teachers had willingly acquiesced to, or were even involved in the Board's demand to have ID materials presented in the classroom.

Defense attorneys for the Dover Area School District tried to present the case that science teachers were active in the decision to change the biology curriculum to include intelligent design.

Jennifer Miller, a Dover science teacher, testified today that teachers were forced to participate, agreeing to compromises they hoped would make the problem go away.

As compromises, Miller said the faculty offered to let the pro-intelligent design textbook “Of Pandas and People” be in the classroom as long as it wasn’t a reference book for the biology class. They also agreed to present more critical discussion of evolutionary theory.

Read it here.

In subsequent testimony science teachers reiterated their position that their acquiescence did not constitute an endorsement of Intelligent Design, that they had profound reservations about the material presented in the supplemental readings recommended by the School Board, and that they in fact had refused to present the material in their classrooms.

The Inky reports:

Dover High School science teachers were so outraged by a decision to introduce what they said was Bible-based creationism into biology class that they refused to read a mandatory statement to their students promoting the idea, according to two science faculty members testifying in a federal trial over the teaching of evolution.

The teachers said the curriculum change approved last year required that students be presented with intelligent design as an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution. They said it would violate professional ethics to teach intelligent design, which posits that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by an intelligent being, in a science classroom.

"I felt it was too close to creationism to be taught," said biology teacher Jennifer Miller.

Bertha Spahr, the senior member of the school's science faculty, said the board's decision was "railroaded" through without consulting the faculty or other experts and put teachers in the untenable position.

"It was a no-win situation," said Spahr, who has taught chemistry at Dover High School for 41 years. "Defy the directive of the school board or go into the classroom and commit an illegal act."

Read it here.








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