Evolution disclaimer case goes to federal appeals court
A federal judge ordered Cobb County school officials in January to immediately remove the stickers, saying they were an endorsement of religion by the public school system. The ruling was appealed to the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which will hear arguments in the case Thursday. The stickers weren’t removed until last spring, when school staffers and students scraped them off almost 35,000 Cobb County schoolbooks.
Advocates on both sides say the appeals court’s ruling will go a long way toward shaping a debate between evolution and creationism ? science and religion ? that has cropped up in various forms all over the nation.
“If it’s unconstitutional to tell students to study evolution with an open mind, then what’s not unconstitutional?” said John West, a senior fellow with Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that supports research of intelligent design ? the belief that a higher power shaped the earth’s creation. “The judge is basically trying to make it unconstitutional for anyone to have a divergent view and we think that has a chilling effect on free speech.”
But Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and co-author of the science book that was stickered, sees the effort as just another front in a battle that intelligent design advocates have fought since 1987, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s law requiring creationism to be taught in schools.
“The anti-evolution forces have been searching for a new strategy that would accomplish the same end,” Miller said. “That purpose is, if not to get evolution out of the schools altogether, then at least undermine it as much as possible in the minds of students.”
The disclaimers were placed in the books in 2002 by school officials in Cobb County, a suburb of about 650,000 people north of Atlanta. The stickers were printed up after more than 2,000 parents complained that science texts presented evolution as a fact, with no mention of other theories.
The stickers read, “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.”
U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper wrote the sticker “conveys an impermissible message of endorsement and tells some citizens that they are political outsiders while telling others they are political insiders.”
Some parents of students, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, sued claiming the stickers violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
Cobb’s school board issued a statement calling the stickers “a reasonable and evenhanded guide to science instruction” that encourages students to be critical thinkers.
The case is one of several in the past year that have pushed the debate between evolution and creationism into the national spotlight.
In Pennsylvania, a federal judge has yet to decide whether the Dover Area School District may require intelligent design instruction in ninth-grade biology classes. A few days after the trial ended, Dover voters ousted eight of the nine school board members who adopted the policy.
The same week, state education officials in Kansas cleared the way for teaching intelligent design and creationism.
The state school board in Ohio approved lesson plans last year that supporters called a compromise between evolution and creationism, but which some scientists say continue to contain inaccurate information about evolution.
Also in 2004, Georgia’s schools superintendent proposed a statewide science curriculum that dropped the word “evolution” in favor of “changes over time.” That plan was soon scrapped amid protests by teachers.