I would suggest to all that being a majority religion, or at least perceiving one is a member of such is not a permanent position and all this border patrolling will achieve nothing except, perhaps, fees for the lawyers.

Keep fighting them Wesley, the World needs the victory of rational thought.

And Tim, I just loved the “you people.” I agree! Its us against them–”Those people.” You know, those people who think separation of church and state is actually required by the Constitution and has allowed religion to florish in this country, and who believe that actual science should be taught in public schools, but religious pseudoscience should not be. Next step, a complete theocracy where we can boot “those people” out of the country and we can live our lives truly as one nation under our God, as He says…well, as we say he says…well, as we say he said in the Bible…well, not all it, but most it…or something like that. Should we kill the liberals or just kick them out?

Good letter. The Kansas Citizens for Science will be offering their support to their sister organization in Florida, as well as encouraging a letter writing campaign in support of good science standards.

We also have a regular bunch of ID supporters here in KS who continually bray about ‘just wait ’til we get our day in court, then you’ll see’. I can just imagine it’s followed by some hollow, maniacal laugh.

Given all the blatant religiosity we have documented from current and former school board members, I would welcome that day in a real court.

Good luck to the citizens and teachers in Polk County.

Lane Taylor, Vice President, Kansas Citizens for Science

ROB says, let’s just take “common descent” out of the curriculum. What’s the logic here? Common descent has lots of empirical support. Why should students be deprived of learning about this big idea in science? The “why” question becomes important, especially when a court gets involved. ROB might have a motive of spite when it comes to me, but spite isn’t really a believable justification for a school board to throw away a whole branch of human inquiry, especially one that comes with data and a history of critical tests. A believable, but constitutionally unjustified, motive is the privileging of a particular religious doctrine. Depriving students of knowing about common descent serves no secular purpose, and only makes sense in the light of a religious antievolution motive.

I don’t think that would be difficult to present to a judge. ROB might still not “see” it, but he ultimately is not who needs to be convinced.

Running afoul of the “purpose” prong of the Lemon test is pretty well guaranteed for Polk County, where the school board is on record as wanting to trash evolution and teach creationism. Simply having them go into evolution denial is a sham that is unlikely to fool anyone, least of all any competent judge.

I’ll note that as far as constitutional interpretation is concerned, antievolution scored once back in 1925, and has been absolutely skunked since then.

ROB should keep it up with the fantasy life. I think that he is going to need it.

However, even if one were to make recourse to the “Lemon test,” I fail to see how simply deleting common descent would run afoul of it.

In any event, I would like to see Barbara Forrest and the other members of the clown car try their luck at such a trial. Hopefully, the opposing counsel would bring up her asinine statement regarding evolutionary theory being indispensable to geology and other physical sciences, when it is clearly the other way around.

I sure hope ROB joins Joe Gallien as the legal brains behind defending the next IDC outbreak… I like cakewalks.

The relevant court case addressing ROB’s proposal is, of course, Epperson v. Arkansas, which said that evolution or other science content cannot be excluded from the curriculum in order to privilege a religious doctrine.

Then there is the history, where the school board members in Polk County have already gone on record that they are seeking to balance evolution with creationism in some form. See Edwards v. Aguillard.