Media: Rolling Stone Magazine

Darwinian Warfare: In a Pennsylvania courtroom, America can’t get the monkey off its back. By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, October 20, 2005.

Kitzmiller v. Dover looked like Scopes in reverse. Instead of a single schoolteacher trying to buck the law by teaching evolution in the intractable heart of the Bible Belt, this case involved a single school board trying to buck the law by slipping a teaspoonful of God into a continent-size, thoroughly secularized school system.

Like Scopes, this case began as a minor political disagreement in a small town that self-consciously grew into a national controversy. Making a long story short, Kitzmiller v. Dover boiled down to a few unusually pious individuals on the school board of a little Pennsylvania town unilaterally voting, in October 2004, to insert a four-paragraph statement about "Intelligent Design" into the local high school's curriculum. Immediately a coalition of parents filed a federal lawsuit against the renegade school board.

The basis of the plaintiffs' suit was found in the 1987 Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard, in which the court ruled that the teaching of "scientific creationism" in Louisiana public schools violated the establishment clause of the Constitution. The crux of the plaintiffs' case in Kitzmiller was that "Intelligent Design" -- the theory backed by the school board -- was just creationism in disguise. If it was, then the Dover school officials would be guilty of the same First Amendment offense described in Aguillard.

Again, this was Scopes, but backward. The religious side was at the defendants' table, and this time it was religion and conservatism that would have to struggle to get a public hearing for its newfangled theory.

More important, however, the prognosis this time imagined religion as the legal loser but the practical winner, instead of the other way around.