Posted on 01/20/2005 10:22:21 AM PST by Tamar1973
As previously reported, US District Judge Clarence Cooper handed down (last week) the much-anticipated ruling in the case of Selman v. Cobb County School District, in which parents challenged a school board decision to place evolution disclaimer stickers in the front cover of some high-school biology textbooks in Cobb County, Georgia, USA.
Contained within the judge’s 44-page ruling was the answer to the question everyone in the Atlanta area seemed to ask: “Would the sticker stick?” Did this 33-word disclaimer, which cautioned students about evolution, violate the US Constitution by “establishing religion”?
Yes, the stickers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion, said Judge Cooper in his ruling. Therefore, the stickers must be removed from the textbooks.
In an Associated Press article (January 13) that was immediately picked up by dozens of news outlets from South Africa to South Dakota, Judge Cooper explained his decision in the following statement:
By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories [emphasis added].
That was last week. This week, it’s a different story. On January 17, the school board decided to appeal Judge Cooper’s decision, choosing to take the case to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. School board attorney Glenn Brock said he will request a delay in complying with the judge’s order to remove the stickers. As a result of the court’s bizarre ruling (including its comment that expressed concern about not wanting to upset those who hold evolutionary beliefs), the sticker, which features the following words, must be removed from the Cobb County high school biology textbooks:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.
Judge Cooper ruled that the stickers went against the First Amendment because they “convey a message of endorsement of religion.”
Jeffrey Selman, a parent of a Cobb County student, filed the suit (along with the American Civil Liberties Union) against the school board. (On the other hand, it should be noted that some 2,300 parents had petitioned in favor of the stickers as a way to help counter the nearly $8 million worth of new curricula that pushed Darwinism unchallenged). Mr. Selman told the Toronto Star that he “was not prepared to live in a theocracy where the views of a militant minority are foisted on everyone.”
Mr. Selman went on to say, “I was terrified about the future of the country I have to live in and my child has to live in. From the Bush White House to the evangelicals on the school board, they were taking away our freedoms.”
Michael Manely, the lawyer representing the parents who were against the stickers, told the Toronto Star, “This is a great day in history and a great day for freedom in our nation.” He added that Cobb County students will now “be permitted to learn science unadulterated by religious dogma.”
But was the judge’s decision really a setback for those who support open discussion of evolution and alternative explanations? One might think so based on some of the headlines from newspapers across the world (even a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates is reporting on this court case).
Dr. John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research, refuses to see this as a setback, telling the Toronto Star that this case reveals that “evolutionists are just very insecure.”
“That sticker did not teach creation or the biblical view of things. It just encouraged students to know that this is not an open-and-shut case,” Morris said.
Ken Ham, president of AiG-USA, commented: “This ruling by Judge Cooper is absolutely preposterous. Here you have a sticker that doesn’t mention God, prayer, the Bible, creation ...and it’s considered religious because the people behind it believe in God.”
Ham added: “So, even when you leave God out, leave creation out, and just have a sticker that talks about evolution, a judge considers that to be religious because the people that came up with it have a religious belief. Do you see the inconsistency here?”
Determining whether the sticker violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment presented Judge Cooper with many things to consider. First, Judge Cooper ruled back on March 31, 2004, that the sticker passed the first prong of the Lemon test, a method used to analyze whether an act of government is constitutional by meeting three criteria: 1) the act has a primarily secular purpose; 2) the primary effect of the act does not promote religion over nonreligion, or promote one religion over another or somehow serve as a government endorsement of religion; and 3) the act does not result in an excessive entanglement between church and state—last week’s ruling pertained to only the last two prongs of the Lemon test.
Yet the stickers were found to be unconstitutional despite a ruling that they are also “fostering critical thinking” about evolution and serve “a clearly secular purpose” (with the judge agreeing that the Cobb County school district had secular, not religious, reasons for adopting the sticker).
Mr. Seth Cooper, an attorney and legal analyst with the Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design think tank, faulted the lead counsel for the school district, Linwood Gunn, for putting up “an incompetent defense.”5 During the November 2004 trial, the Institute issued a statement noting that Gunn decided not to have any scientists serve as rebuttal witnesses, despite the fact that dozens of Georgia scientists had submitted a “friend of the court” brief defending the district.5 (On a related note, in a brief submitted to the court last spring, the ACLU made the false claim that there are no scientists who dispute evolution and that those who dispute evolution do so only for religious purposes.)
“A vigorous defense of the sticker’s constitutionality would have focused upon the growing number of scientists who have raised scientific criticisms of aspects of neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories,” said Cooper.
Ham agreed, asking the question, “Is evolution so weak that it has to be legislated in order to protect it?”
Ham said he believes the battle in the public schools ultimately comes down to a spiritual and emotional issue, where there is no such thing as neutrality.
He explained, “When the public school says you have to teach every aspect of reality without any acknowledgement of God or the Bible, you’re saying that God has nothing to do with reality. This is not a neutral position towards religion. It’s actually a religious position that says that everything can be explained without God.”
Ham concluded with the general observation that the Bible tells us there is no such thing as being neutral. Luke 11:23 says a person is either for Christ or against Him. Thus the battle in America’s public schools is really a clash of worldviews—one explains life with God; and one, without God.
We will keep you posted on the progress of the appeal of the judge’s decision.
Creationist theory is much more logical than evolution.
To think all forms of reproducing life suddenly burst forward with male and female copies from a slime pond is a little fantastic isn't it? The odds of that happening even once is a kabillion zillion to one, but happening thousands of times over?
yea right.
evolutionists are the ones who need to be introduced to logic.
That's the point. The sticker in question never mentions G-d at all and yet atheists and other pro-evolution folks are threatened by it. If their beliefs are so indefensible that a simply disclaimer reminding people that evolution is a THEORY sends them into fits, that doesn't bode well for the strength of their ideas to carry on in the marketplace.
The "No-Goddists" are a hundred fold more dangerous to our freedoms than those they oppose.
"To think all forms of reproducing life suddenly burst forward with male and female copies from a slime pond is a little fantastic isn't it? "
No moreso than the bearded white guy on his magical throne waving his magic wand and 'Voila!' - everything's here!
Creationism is a mindless story for little kids and the extremely ignorant, superstitious people alive when the Old Testament was first written and that's about all.
If you want to teach it to kids, please do so at home or at church. Leave school to educating kids, not filling their minds with myth (unless it's taught in the Mythology101 class).
> To think all forms of reproducing life suddenly burst forward with male and female copies from a slime pond is a little fantastic isn't it?
Yes, it is. That's why evolutionists don't think that way. Only Creationists think that way.
The day after the election the left was blaming the result on people "who think the earth was created in 6 days"
The left will be pushing this issue, attempting to either split the conservative movement, or at the least continue to paint them as uneducated dolts.
There are lots of important political fights to come in the next few years, such as supreme court justices. We don't need to be wasting our time with silly stuff like this.
And that's no theory either, it's a proven fact.
"No goddists" have a nasty habit of killing people by the millions when things don't work out their way.
""No goddists" have a nasty habit of killing people by the millions when things don't work out their way."
Only after taking good notes of how the middle Age Christians did it!
> The "No-Goddists"
Yeah, all those nasty people who *refuse* to allow the Godly alternative theories on, say orbital mechanics! Rather than teaching just the scientific religion that says that planets follow mathematically definable orbits based on distance, mass and angular momentum, why don't they teach BOTH sides... that God is individually manhandling each planet around the Sun, and that at any moment, the planets could all go whizzing off into the universe?
[/sarcasm]
Oh, please.
Will someone please answer my question as to why it's so d@mn important that schools say that God made the species, when they don't seem to give a rip about what else God must have done?
Why is this particular issue such a big deal?
If you think God did everything, then great. God created Evolution. Why is this a problem?
Then why are so adamant about it? Just a little deductive reasoning tells me that you want that sticker because it DOES IN FACT allow you to say that God zapped the universe into existence in 6 days.
Why won't one of you biblical litteralists explain why you dont' care how science class teaches about where snow comes from, but you get all hot and bothered about where science says species come from?
Genesis doesn't give that kind of detail, and it doesn't need to.
Actually, the meaning of the word "day" is subject to question. The bible isn't literal is much of it's meaning.
What would a day be measured by before the solar system was created?
Going by the big bang theory, which actually fits biblicly,
at first our solar system was smaller. We know scientificly that the solar system is expanding, slowly, and is also slowing down. It stands to reason that when it was first CREATED, it's expansion was much more rapid.
This shoots down the "earth is a billion years old" theory.
The moon is as old as the earth. How come there isn't any life on it yet? Surely there should be at least some cosmic life producing bacteria on it, and it should have evolved by now.
True, the school board's actions may be used by the loony-left press, although I doubt that any harm will come to anyone's political careers in Cobb County Ga. OTOH, we may as well just go about living our lives as we see fit, because the leftist press is going to whine no matter what we do.
Because god wouldn't create anything flawed like evolution.
> This sticker doesn't mention G-d,Buddha,Mohammad, Allah, Ganesh, etc. even once.
Why does the stickert not mention *ALL* scientific theories? Why separate evolution? The answer is simple and obvious... there is opposition to the teaching of evolution, and it's all religious in nature.
Far better would be a sticker that says "Be skeptical of all claims. The more fantastic the claim, the more fantastic the evidence should be to prove it."
> We know scientificly that the solar system is expanding, slowly, and is also slowing down.
I'm curious. What do you mena by "the solar system is expanding" and "slowign down?" Define your terms, please.
> This shoots down the "earth is a billion years old" theory.
Indeed. It's much more like 4.5 billion than one billion.
> The moon is as old as the earth. How come there isn't any life on it yet?
Too small to maintain an atmosphere. The chemicals that seem to be needed for our type of life (the only type yet known), cannot exist on the Moon. Water, carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen, nitrogen all boil away into space when on the Moon. The RMS speed of the molecules is too high a fraction of the Moon's escape velocity.
Evolution thery is already in the book. therefore, there is no need to mention it on the sticker, except to say that it is only a theory, and there are theories.
> Because god wouldn't create anything flawed like...
... Humans?
Tell that to the people in Darfur, or the people of Jerusalem in 1099 who were all put to the sword by Christians. People who blindly believe in anything have a nasty habit of killing people by the millions if things don't go their way, it's not limited to the areligious.
As an engineer, I think Evolution is one of the greatest creations of all. We can't build a car that can reproduce itself, but God's Evolution invention can.
The Evolution invention can adapt as time goes by. But if my car doesn't have 4wd, it can't go lots of places. But give Evolution enough time, and short legs will get longer and stronger, and pretty soon my horse will be carrying me farther and higher than ever.
This Evolution invention can bring microbes that can eat oil, and new viruses that can deliver vaccines. Did you think that scientists "created" those life forms? Wrong! They merely provided the right environment, and they evolved all on their own.
Engineers like elegant inventions. And God's Evolution invention is one of the most elegant there is.
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