Argentina Skeptics

Recently elected as an alternate delegate to the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania (ACLU PA) state Board of Directors, my first exposure to the mental machinery of this finely honed civil liberties protection organization was in June of 2005 where we met in the sumptuous board room on the 21st floor of a Philadelphia skyscraper. This is the board room of a prominent law firm that routinely works with the ACLU in civil liberty cases. High on the agenda of that meeting (and the subsequent September meeting) was the preparation for trial of a case hearing arguments for and against ‘Intelligent Design’ being taught in the ninth grade biology classroom of a Dover, PA, public school.

What is remarkable about this organization I belong to is its very, very lean and efficient staff, overseen by twenty one board members from all over the state, but primarily from the two large metropolitan areas of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. I experienced tingling sensations of pride as the lead ACLU attorney, Vic Walczak, outlined confidential strategy in the upcoming case to be heard over a thirty-day period in October. The cost for preparation and trial would be approximately $2,000,000 –a cost to be shared by the ACLU PA with the private law firm of Pepper Hamilton, also of Philadelphia.

As a non-voting member of the Board, my perception of the pending trial was mixed. The strategy presented at our meetings seemed iron clad in their exposing the religious motivation of the Dover School Board: to teach students a form of creationism, which has been determined by previous Supreme Court decisions to be detrimental to the Nation’s policy of separating church affairs from state affairs. One of our biggest fears was the fact that Judge John E. Jones was a George W. Bush appointee in 2001 (conservative and ambitious). The world knows how President Bush feels about teaching Intelligent Design –he is for teaching it!

I saw none of the trial, but friends of ours in York (the County where Dover is located) forwarded my wife and me excerpts of their newspapers by e-mail nearly on a daily basis. It was dubbed the ‘Panda Trial’ by the 'York Dispatch' and the 'York Daily Record' newspapers, and was touted as the 21st century’s rehash of the 1920 Scope’s ‘Monkey Trial’ in Tennessee. Panda is derived from the Intelligent Design text book ‘Of Pandas and People’ that was mysteriously funded and distributed by one of the school board members as an ancillary text to the students’ biology textbook.

I should have known by our attorneys’ briefings that this would be a hilarious case –and it was! The stream of e-mails from York read like a comical story. The primary defendant on the school board said one thing and then another about a particular school board meeting. Cross examination exposed several lies that were confirmed by news reporters present at school board meetings. Finally trapped, he admitted to the judge that he was addicted to Oxycontin that was brought on by treating a health problem. This, he claimed, caused his memory to lapse (in other words, he used the same excuse that Rush Limbaugh, famous conservative radio commentator, used when he was found out to be abusing Oxycontin –who then sought help from the ACLU. Mr. Limbaugh doesn’t criticize the ACLU anymore).

For nearly a whole day, Lehigh University professor Michael Behe, expert witness for the school district, droned on and on about the flagellum microorganism and how its complexity proves the presence of Intelligent Design. His ruminations went on much too long causing one local editor to lampoon the professor’s ramblings in his newspaper column, using hilarious parody. At another time, an attorney for the school board tried to have admitted as evidence a newspaper article favoring their argument –after the defense had previously insisted that the reporters covering school board meetings gave unfavorable news reports. Judge Jones rebuked the attorney in no uncertain words: “Don’t insult my intelligence!”

I read recently that two school board members may be cited for perjury in the trial. Since the judge ruled in favor of the ACLU, the costs incurred by the plaintiffs will have to be paid by the Dover School District, those moneys will be split between the ACLU, AU and Pepper Hamilton. Ironically, the attorneys for the Thomas Moore Law Center had bragged early on that they wanted to take this case to the Supreme Court, but that won’t happen since all school board members up for re-election were defeated in the November elections. Yes, that’s right, Dover’s embarrassed citizens replaced overt religiosity with new school board members who had campaigned to end this debacle.

This is how the Scopes Monkey Trial should have ended nearly a century ago! That trial had its version of comedy and unbelievable cross examination, but that is another story.

The ACLU lost that trial, only because religion was too much a ‘sacred cow’ to be tested in a ‘Bible Belt’ community.

January 15, 2006.

About the author
Ron Stauffer is a 66 year old activist for the progression of science and reason, and the debunking of cults and religion. He is an American engineer and surveyor whose non-vocational interests are mainly history, anthropology and philosophy. Ron is the author of Kentucky Dreamin’, a novel of suspense and romance about atheists affected by the so called ‘war on terror.’ He has been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) since 1989, and a past president of the Keystone Chapter (six counties in south central Pennsylvania, PA), in the late nineteen nineties. He is one of the founding members of Atheist Station.