It was a replay of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Only this time, evolution beat creationism. At the federal courthouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, last fall, US District Court judge John E. Jones III listened as proponents of intelligent design argued that their supposedly scientific alternative to evolutionary theory should be presented in biology classes in the Dover Area school district. Jones didn’t buy it. A Republican lawyer who worked his way up through state politics and was appointed to the bench by George W. Bush in 2002, Jones issued a blistering decision against the school board. Intelligent design, he wrote in a meticulously documented decision, is “an inherently religious proposition.”

– Mark Robinson

Excerpts from Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, December 2005:

[An] objective student can reasonably infer that the [school] District’s favored view is a religious one, and that the District is accordingly sponsoring a form of religion.

Intelligent design’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not intelligent design itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the intelligent design movement is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with intelligent design.

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 intelligent design, 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.

The Big Idea: Takedown Artists

Tenacious and resourceful, these investigators won’t stop until the truth is out there.

TheSmokingGun.com

The troublemakers at this document repository just wanted to see author James Frey’s arrest record. They ended up revealing all the big lies in his best seller A Million Little Pieces.

PD Notebook

This South Korean TV news show exposed stem cell rock star Woo Suk Hwang as a fraud. The price? Show canceled.

Snopes.com

Run by a couple, this site separates urban legends (Lasik at home!) from bizarre realities (old pancake mix can kill!). Latest coup: cameos in last year’s film The God Who Wasn’t There.



credit:John Midgley

Judge John E. Jones III

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