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By MARTHA RAFFAELE, Associated Press Writer
MercedSun-Star.com
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| HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - The state American Civil Liberties Union plans to file a federal lawsuit Tuesday against a Pennsylvania school district that is requiring students to learn about alternatives to the theory of evolution. | Sorry if this is getting repetitive ... you have only to read the Dover School Board's: PRESS RELEASE FOR BIOLOGY CURRICULUM--updated 11/19/04 to see that they are not "requiring students to learn about alternatives ... " They are making students aware that there are alternatives, and making additional study materials available to students who wish to pursue them.
Anyone with kids in school knows how much of a danger there is that High School students might want to pursue a field of study not a part of the required curriculum! |
| The ACLU said its lawsuit will be the first to challenge whether public schools should teach "intelligent design," which holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by some higher power. | I'm not sure if this is ACLU or Ms. Raffaele (the writer) whose chosen wording here makes a well thought out piece of scientific thought seem deterministic and exclusionist.
Actually, it is the ACLU who seeks to legistlate the certitude of one idea, and make consideration of the other idea illegal. This is far closer to being a first amendment violation than the curriculum of this Pennsylvania school board. The question involved is whether human beings, and all life on earth are the result of design, or random occurrence. This question is very convincingly treated in the following document "Are we designs or occurrences? Should science and government prejudge the question?" ... which I encourage my readers to check out. On page 17, the author lists some of the "results of [scientific] analysis that tend to confirm design." This is the crux, really; there is good scientific analysis supporting the proposition. |
| The Dover Area School District was believed to be the first in the nation to mandate intelligent design when it voted 6-3 in October in favor of including the concept in the science curriculum. | |
| The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State have scheduled a news conference Tuesday to discuss the suit, which will be filed in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, ACLU spokesman Paul Silva said Monday. | |
| Neither Silva nor Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, would comment on the specifics of the complaint. | These are the people trying to legislate into existence a state ideology; the thing the first amendment forbids. |
| School superintendent Richard Nilsen had no comment Monday. Administrators have declined to comment on the mandate, which applies to ninth-grade biology classes at Dover High School, in rural south-central Pennsylvania. | It's not a mandate, it's a curriculum. Word choice, here, tries to create the controversy from nothing. |
| School board member William Buckingham spearheaded the change as the leader of the board's curriculum committee. He has said that he proposed the change as a way of balancing evolution with competing theories that raised questions about its scientific validity. | This is worded to dichotomize what is not. That evolution is a theory is simply factual. The scientific method hypothesizes from observation, and then seeks to prove or disprove by experimentation. All of science knows that any given theory, no matter how many things it adequately proves, is completely proven false and discredited by a single fact it cannot explain. There are already many such in the case of evolution. Scientists who subscribe to evolution say the theory has not explained these things, YET. And there is no scientific proof that evolution cannot be true; so the environment is and remains currently that good science is done on the side of evolution and also on the side of other theories. Doesn't it make sense to teach this to our children, since it is the true state of science today? |
| At least one other district has recently become embroiled in federal litigation over teaching evolution. A federal judge in Georgia is considering the constitutionality of a suburban Atlanta district's decision to include a warning sticker about evolution in biology textbooks. | Ms. Raffaele hopes, here, for an uninformed reader. The "warning" simply states the undisputed fact that evolution is a theory. Very scary! |
| Last month, the Dover district issued a statement saying that state academic standards require the teaching of evolution, which holds that Earth is billions of years old and that life forms developed over millions of years. | |
| But the statement also said Charles Darwin's theory "is still being tested as new evidence is discovered," and that intelligent design "is an explanation of the origins of life that differs from Darwin's view." | Beginning the sentence with the word "But" here implies that with the two quotes, here, something bad is being done. But both statements are simply the truth. The school board also say: "The statements were developed to provide a balanced view, not teach or present religious beliefs." |
| Additionally, district officials said they would monitor the lessons "to make sure no one is promoting but also not inhibiting religion." | This is a nice job of ferreting out a phrase that sounds, on its face, inappropriate. But consider: both the promotion of religion and the inhibition of religion represent "religious teaching" ... both are agendas pertaining to religion; therefore niether of these things is appropriate for a public education entity to engage in. Hence this statement of the school board is entirely proper. |
| The ACLU has said intelligent design is a more secular form of creationism, a Biblical-based view that credits the origin of species to God, and may violate the constitutional separation of church and state. | Secular: Not specifically relating to religion or to a religious body. So by the ACLU's description, here: intelligent design is a form of a biblical-based (i.e., of the Christian tradition) view, which is not specifically relating to religion or to a religious body. Therefore, the ACLU in describing their case proves themselves without a case!
I'd like to quote the First Amendment clause all this is about, because most people don't realize what it actually says: ""Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... " Congress has passed no "law respecting an establishment of religion" ... but one of the primary missions of the ACLU is "prohibiting the free exercise thereof" through the filing of lawsuits such as this one. |
| Posted on 12/13/04 16:45:17 http://www.mercedsun-star.com/24hour/nation/story/1922675p-9880003c.html | © Copyright 2004 AJJE Enterprises |
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