A few days ago I reported that the Dawkins Foundation and the Freedom from Religion Foundation filed a complaint with Georgia Southern University (a state school) about the religious proselytizing of Associate Professor Emerson T. McMullen. I contributed a bit to the complaint by showing how McMullen’s claims about evolution were dead wrong, and how he was promoting creationism in his classes. (He teaches history, but also the history of science as well as courses called “Science and Religion” and “Dinosaurs and Extinction.”

There’s no doubt from the complaint (see pdf here) that McMullen and his school are violating the First Amendment by sneaking religiously-based creationism into the classroom as science.

Georgia Southern has in fact just responded to the complaint, and in a pretty good way, promising an investigation of the matter and avowing this:

“As a public university, Georgia Southern is well aware of its great responsibility to abide by all provisions of the Constitution of the United States of America, including the freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment. The institution strives to investigate allegations of Constitutional violations promptly and to take appropriate corrective action based on the results of the investigation. The institution appreciates your communication of a potential violation and will proceed with a thorough investigation of the allegations….”

Here’s the response of their legal office:

Of course there’s no guarantee that McMullen’s tendency to shove Jesus down the throats of his students will be stopped, but I have a good feeling about this. And I can’t believe that the large biology faculty of Georgia Southern would disagree with our analysis of McMullen’s ridiculous claims about evolution.