Where do they find these people?
I watched Nova's very intelligent, two-hour show on the Dover, Pa., intelligent design trial last night. It is worth watching if your local public television station ever broadcasts it again. You will come to realize what a stunning defeat for the religious right this was.
Parents sued the Dover Area School Board after the school board majority attempted to introduce a religious alternative to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, known as Intelligent Design, into high school biology classes. Intelligent Design, as the trial proved, was thinly-disguised creationism, a concept ginned up after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the teaching of Genesis creationism in public schools in 1987. It posits that some living things are so complex that an "Intelligent Designer," i.e., God, must have put them together in his workshop. It was a clear and classic violation of the U.S. Constitution's mandated separation of church and state, but this took place around the high-water mark of the Bush Administration and the fundamentalist Christian right was feeling its oats.
The trial was held in U.S. District Court, Harrisburg, in the fall of 2005. Judge John Jones III, a moderate Republican, handed down a ruling in December of that year ordering the Dover Area School Board not to teach "Intelligent Design" in its schools. Scientific testimony at the trial demolished the critics of evolution, while other testimony revealed the subterfuge behind the school board's scheme. Sick and tired of lies and evasions by the I.D. advocates on the Dover board, Jones slammed the "breathtaking inanity" of their transparent effort to introduce conservative Christian beliefs into the public school curriculum.
My overall reaction to "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," was wonderment about some of the people who get elected to run our schools. Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell, the chief architects of the Intelligent Design fiasco at Dover, are about as qualified to run a public school district as advocates of using bleeding and leaches in medical treatment would be to run the Penn State School of Medicine at Hershey.
There isn't any intelligence test required to be a school director. District Justices in Pennsylvania aren't required to be lawyers but must still complete and pass a course of instruction after they are elected. Not so for school directors. Any idiot who gets more votes than the next guy can serve. The Intelligent Design fiasco cost the taxpayers of Dover a million dollars in legal fees.
My other reaction from watching the show was that the science teachers at Dover Area High School were true heroes. They fought the school board's effort to fundamentalize the biology classes at more than a little risk to their jobs. This wasn't just passive resistance; they put their strong objections into a firmly-worded letter to the school board and made it public. If they have not been given formal honors by their profession for their courage, they ought to be.
Many of the trial participants and observers were interviewed for the Nova production, including Judge Jones, former York Daily Record reporter Lauri Lebo, whose own book on the trial comes out next year, and Buckingham and Bonsell. Michael Behe, the Lehigh University scientist whose writings are a linchpin of the Intelligent Design movement, and who has been disavowed by his Lehigh colleagues, declined to be interviewed.