Court Ruling Rips 'Evolution as Theory' Stickers from Science Texts
by Jim Brown
January 13, 2005
(AgapePress) - A Christian attorney says a federal judge has joined the ACLU in its crusade against critical thinking by ruling that a suburban Atlanta school district must remove an evolution disclaimer from science books.On Thursday (January 13), U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Cooper ordered the Cobb County Board of Education must remove from inside the textbooks a sticker that says "Evolution is a theory not a fact, regarding the origin of living things." Continuing, the sticker admonished students that the material "should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
Evidently the caveats did nothing to dissuade Judge Cooper, who said the stickers violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Parents and the American Civil Liberties Union had challenged the stickers in court, arguing they violated the "separation of church and state" -- and Cooper agreed.
But Brian Fahling, an attorney with a Mississippi-based pro-family organization, says the stickers do not constitute a violation of the Establishment Clause.
Brian Fahling | |
"I think it's absolutely beyond the pale that we live in a nation where the fact that maybe people who had religious beliefs [and] wanted to encourage their students to think with an open mind is somehow now a violation of the Establishment Clause," says Fahling. "It just makes one unable to comprehend how the judge got there -- other than ultimately a hostility, I think, to religion."Judge Cooper went even further in his ruling, saying the sticker "conveys an impermissible message of endorsement and tells some citizens that they are political outsiders while telling others they are political insiders." Fahling, who is with the Tupelo-based American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, implies that Cooper is simply falling in line with the educational establishment.
"Really what's going on here is there's this oppressive orthodoxy that has been institutionalized in the academy and now in our public schools with respect to evolution. You can't question it," he says in reference to the theory of evolution, "and if anybody does question it, then they're crushed, both in the science community and the academic community."
And now, the attorney says, parents "who would actually like their children to be taught real science" have been crushed as well.
The ruling, says Fahling, does not bode well for future attempts to offer genuine science in opposition to evolution in public schools. The stickers were first placed in the Cobb County science texts in 2002 after thousands of parents complained that the books presented evolution as fact and made no mention of rival ideas about the origin of life.
