John G. West

The tasteless, over-the-top effort by some Darwinists (especially those at the ACLU) to castigate anyone who disagrees with them on evolution as Nazis or Holocaust deniers continues unabated. In a recent article in the Cleveland Jewish News, Jeffrey Selman, whom the ACLU represented in the Cobb County case, implies that if we allow students to hear about scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory we are one step away from putting Jews in the ovens:

When a federal judge in Georgia ruled last week that a local school board’s decision to put a small sticker on its science textbooks labeling evolution “a theory, not a fact” was unconstitutional, Jeffrey Selman said it was primarily an American issue.

Still, he said, he could not help but view it through the lens of his Jewishness.

“Look what happened in Germany,” said Selman…”The German Jews said, ‘We’re Germans. We’ll be fine.’ The next thing you know, they were opening the oven doors for us.”

The Berkshire Eagle newspaper in Massachusetts is running an absurd editorial with the histrionic title, “Ayatollahs in the classroom”. To get the full effect, you might want to turn on a CD of some suitably melodramatic music from a horror film before you start reading: A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it’s a handful of judges — “activist judges” in the view of their critics — who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America’s public-school classrooms. According to this Berkshire editorialist, discussing scientific criticisms of modern evolutionary theory in the classroom is tantamount to turning America Read More ›

Constitutional attorney Brian Fahling has a sensible discussion of the Cobb County decision in the Union-Leader, here. Especially pertinent is his paragraph responding to the charge that it was illegitimate for the school district to single out evolution in its disclaimer. Fahling hits the proverbial nail on the head when he says: I suspect that evolution was singled out because it is the only scientific theory whose adherents are utterly intolerant of criticism, and it is the only scientific theory taught in public schools as the gospel truth that no reasonable person could question. This is not only troubling for parents whose religion rejects the theory, but it is equally troubling from an academic, scientific, and intellectual perspective for obvious Read More ›

Darwinian biologist Ken Miller ventures into the field of constitutional law and flops. In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Miller mangles a key finding of the judge in the Cobb County case. According to Miller: The judge simply read the sticker and saw that it served no scientific or educational purpose. Once that was clear, he looked to the reasons for slapping it in the textbooks of thousands of students, and here the record was equally clear. The sticker was inserted to advance a particular set of religious beliefs… While the ACLU claimed that the Cobb County school board adopted its textbook sticker in order to advance religion, the judge rejected that claim. Instead, the judge found that the Read More ›

A California school district has been sued in federal court for allegedly violating a parent’s civil rights during a controversy over how to teach evolution. For more than a year, Larry Caldwell tried to get the Roseville Joint Union High School District outside of Sacramento to consider changing how it taught the theory of evolution in its biology classes. Caldwell, who has three children, says he wanted the district to correct factual errors in its biology textbooks as well as to introduce students to some scientific criticisms of modern evolutionary theory. Caldwell did not propose that the district teach creationism or alternatives to evolution. The Roseville district ultimately rejected Caldwell’s recommendations. But in the process of trying to scuttle his Read More ›