Culture

The lawsuit filed by attorney and parent Larry Caldwell against the Roseville Joint Union High School District for violation of his civil rights has been making waves in the media.

World Net Daily and The Sacramento Bee have stories discussing Caldwell’s suit and the inequities he was subjected to by the District over the course of a whole year.

In the interests of accuracy, note that Sacramento Bee‘s Laurel Rosen reports inaccurately when she (mistakenly) asserts that Caldwell tried to introduce “anti-evolution material” in the District. “Anti-evolution” entails the removal of chemical and biological evolutionary theories from curriculum, but what Caldwell sought to do was precisely the opposite: teach students even more about existing scientific theories by requiring them to learn the scientific weaknesses of such theories as well as their scientific strengths. (Caldwell’s proposal did not even call for the teaching of the scientific theory of intelligent design.)

Caldwell’s 96-page complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California (available here) tells of the long train of abuses that Caldwell was subjected to by the District because it disagreed with Caldwell’s position that students should be able to learn about the scientific controversies surrounding biological and chemical evolutionary theories. Caldwell’s complaint leaves the District with a lot of explaining to do — particularly its pattern of ignoring its own procedures or making up new ones and applying them only to Caldwell.

For eight long months the Board sought to prevent Caldwell from exercising his rights as a citizen and parent to put his policy proposal on the Board’s agenda. Caldwell’s
“Quality Science Education” simply states:

The York Daily Record on Sunday published a brief opinion piece from a York resident challenging the paper’s definition of intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Are our kids being taught to think? Do schools want to give a good education? The York Daily Record definition says, “ID holds that all living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by an unspecified divine being.” The YDR is not alone in using this description which is actually how critics of design define the theory. Hopefully the YDR will begin using a more accurate description, or at least attribute this one to critics rather than leaving it as if it were the proper, working definition. Once more, with feeling: Read More ›

Last Sunday’s episode of Boston Legal (“From Whence We Came”) was ripped straight from the headlines in typical David Kelley style. Hotshot young attorney Lori (Monica Potter), with help from Denny Crane (played by William Shatner, and for which he won a Golden Globe the same Sunday night) and Shirley Schmidt (the newest addition to the show, played by Candace Bergen), defends a school superintendent being sued by two science teachers who were fired for refusing to teach creationism.

Kelley’s writing is always sharp and his dialogue is witty, but his take on the evolution issue merely regurgitates the old Inherit The Wind trope of religion vs. science. He never even bothers to really define evolution or intelligent design, which is used interchangeably with creationism.

Leave it to the capitalists at Amazon.com and the free market system to captialize on the censorship of UMOL by the Darwinists. Several months ago UMOL sales were languishing well below 7,000 on Amazon.com’s sales ranking system. However, thanks to KNME censorship , the film actually peaked at 2,500 over the weekend. Currently it has slipped a bit to 4,540. Still this shows a serious spike in sales. We’ve received dozens of requests for the film ourselves. Nothing spurs sales quite like a good controversy. Had KNME just let well enough alone this whole thing would have blown over by now. But, thanks to their protectionism more and more people are seeing UMOL than otherwise would have been the case. Read More ›

Scrappleface.com has skewered last week’s federal court ruling on Cobb Co.’s textbook disclaimers with a clever bit of satire. “U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper ruled that the old labels could “confuse” public school students, who are not accustomed to thinking critically.” Indeed! The Scrapplers report that the newly evolved stickers now in textbooks read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a fact, not a theory, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with childlike trust, accepted obediently and defended vigorously against the attacks of ignorant monotheists.” Read the entire ScrappleFace satire here (and yes, the Cooper quotations are pure fiction).

CSC writer in residence, Jonathan Witt had an op-ed published in the Albuquerque Journal Sunday commenting on PBS affiliate KNME’s censorship troubles. The thing that Witt’s op-ed nicely brings to light is the double standard about funding and editorial control that exists at PBS from the top down. He gives specific examples suggesting that KNME normally follows a very different (and much more sane) test for private funders, one that allows foundations who fund documentaries to have points of view and even worldviews. KNME proclaims that they must not let public get the “perception” that funders of a program “might” have had control over the content. “Indeed, no PBS affiliate consistently follows the smell test laid out by KNME. If Read More ›

The censorship issue has obviously struck a nerve in New Mexico, as evidenced by this cartoon from Friday’s Albuquerque Journal. Creationism evolves. How original. I think this is only about the 499th time that this has been in a cartoon or headline.

Sadness is the emotion that ABC’s Nightline tried to inculcate last night with its “War in Dover” episode and, if my reactions are any judge, they succeeded.

First is the sadness one feels for all the good people of Dover who have behaved badly toward one another. John Donvan showed that people in that little town really are afraid to talk to one another, and that everything anyone says has to be filtered through a legal screen (perhaps we need a set of Miranda Rights from now on that will be read to citizens who presume to express themselves on public policy).

Worst of all, Donvan demonstrated that any personal moral suspicion one has of his neighbor in Dover these days is fair game to bring into the combat over evolution. All of this is because of a rather tame and otherwise irrelevant statement about intelligent design. The culture wars have come to this.

So, I congratulate John Donvan and his producers for producing the insight that these evolution fights in localities are enormously divisive, leaving very hurt feelings all around.

The newest Accuracy in Media report takes PBS to task for liberal bias and viewpoint discrimination. The piece is particularly good on PBS’s deeply flawed treatment of the controversy over evolution in the public schools: Then, Moyers turned to another current topic, the ACLU’s lawsuits against school districts that want to “teach an alternative to evolution.” Romero insisted that, “teaching alternatives to evolution is about teaching religion in our public schools. And in a country as diverse as this one, and in a country where religious belief is such a core belief for so many Americans, you want to keep the government as far away as we can from involving itself in our most important and private institutions.” Romero’s statement Read More ›

The rather confusing “[e]volution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things” language proved a primary component in the undoing of the textbook sticker at issue in Selman v. Cobb County School District — decided yesterday in an opinion handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Cooper. Pessimism about the outcome peppered my previous post about this case (see here, where you can also find the sticker’s text). Yet, a genuine understanding of the case requires attention to the details of the Judge’s opinion, and it is important to keep in mind some of the most positive aspects of the ruling. (Important critiques of portions of the Judge’s opinion will follow in a subsequent posting, and strong exceptions to the School District attorney’s defense have been several times.)

In light of Judge Cooper’s decision, it remains constitutional for students to critically analyze aspects of chemical and biological evolutionary theories. As has long been maintained by the scientific community challenging aspects of chemical and biological evolutionary theories, the academic freedom of teachers and students to be able to learn about such scientific controversies and to critically analyze the evidence supporting those theories is of primary importance. This freedom was put at risk by the arguments made by the ACLU in the Cobb County case, but the judge ultimately rejected many of the ACLU’s most far-reaching claims.

Judge Cooper allowed that, in the context of education in biological and chemical evolutionary theories, there IS a secular purpose in promoting critical thinking. Most Americans are probably unaware that critical thinking is itself a contested issue these days, but the ACLU took exception to such critical thinking as one of its arguments to the Judge. Fortunately, the Judge didn’t take the ACLU up in this regard. In his opinion, the Judge states the following:

Fostering critical thinking is a clearly secular purpose for the Sticker, which the Court finds is not a sham; the Sticker appears to have the purpose of furthering critical thinking because it tells students to approach the material on evolution with an open mind, to study it carefully, and to give it critical consideration. (Judge’s Opinion, page 24.)

It’s hard to argue with that. Not that the ACLU didn’t try. They did. But they didn’t succeed in persuading the Judge.