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- From: dreitman@oregon.uoregon.edu (Daniel R. Reitman, Attorney to Be)
- Newsgroups: misc.legal
- Subject: Re: The Supreme Court Upholds Freedom of Speech
- Date: 22 Jan 1993 16:01 PST
- Organization: University of Oregon
- Lines: 40
- Distribution: world
- Message-ID: <22JAN199316012648@oregon.uoregon.edu>
- References: <1993Jan14.222658.4107@wetware.com> <19564@smoke.brl.mil> <1993Jan15.184050.21761@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> <19571@smoke.brl.mil>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: oregon.uoregon.edu
- Summary: Religious freedom must apply *especially* to Error.
- Keywords: AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power
- News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41
-
- In article <19571@smoke.brl.mil>,
- matt@smoke.brl.mil (Matthew Rosenblatt) writes...
- >How about the Evolutionists? At first, only Creationism could be taught
- >in the public schools. It was prohibited by law to teach Evolution
- >there, as the Scopes "monkey trial" demonstrated. One would think
- >that once Evolutionists won the right to have their doctrine taught
- >in public schools, they would be the most tolerant of letting Creation
- >be taught there also. One would think that those whose ideas had been
- >suppressed would be least likely to go about suppressing the ideas of
- >others.
- >
- >But that's not what happened. What happened was that as soon as the
- >Evolutionists had gained power, they proceeded to use Federal lawsuits
- >to ban Creationist teaching from the public schools. It is a natural
- >tendency for someone who believes he has the Truth to want to suppress
- >the teaching of what he thinks is Error, and the Evolutionists succumbed
- >to that natural tendency. Hypocrisy?
-
- Correction: Most of the evolution lawsuits of the 80's were constitutional
- challenges to various statutes purporting to promote "Balanced treatment" of
- creation and evolution in public school biology curricula. The problems are:
-
- 1. As was determined in Arkansas, there is simply insufficient
- non-religious material to create a curriculum if you wanted to. The official
- who was assigned had to resort to such publications as Readers' Digest. I
- don't think that makes for a good science education.
- 2. Most creationists, including those at the movement's intellectual
- center, the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, were quite open about
- the religious, and specifically literalist Judeo-Christian, aspects of their
- beliefs. There is a serious Establishment issue.
-
- I advise you read Nelkin's _The Creation Controversy_. It includes an account
- of the Arkansas hearing, after which several evangelists without substantiation
- accused the state Attorney General of collusion, and the Louisiana statute
- struck down in _Aguilar_, and a discussion of the failed attempt in the 70's to
- introduce a nontradition social studies course into the Ithaca, New York,
- public schools. It should cure you of your accusations of one-sided
- intolerance and explain why creation does not belong in science class.
-
- Daniel Reitman
-