Have you even read the constitution?
When I was in high school one of the mandated books in my Literature class was Siddartha by Herman Hesse (which is a book that extolls the virtues of Buddhism). Nobody complained. Quite frankly if mandating a suggestion to read a certain book is an establishment of religion, then mandating the teaching of evolution could also be considered an establishment of religion as it contradicts the deeply held religious beliefs of some people.
But the fact is that neither of them is "an establishment of religion." Both may be considered as a tacit endorsement of a religious position, but no reasonable person could conclude that what the Dover School board did was in any way "an establishment of religion."
Read the history of the First Amendment and you will see what the founders intended by that clause. The fact is that the same Congress that passed the first amendment also passed a resolution and law mandating the teaching of the Bible using public funds in the Territories of the United States. That was not an establishment of religion then and this is not one now.
I am amazed at all the people on this board -- supposed conservatives -- who have bought into this idea of the constitution being a living document. It is not. It is a contract.
I'm sure that if a judge had found that the teaching of evolution violated some obscure clause in the Constitution, that you guys would be all over that decision like white on rice. Just because you won on this issue does not mean you actually won anything. This is a pyrric victory for any conservative who believes in evolution.
Hopefully because this decision is so overreaching, it will sound the death knell for the Lemon Test. In that sense it may yet be a victory for the principles of original intent.
If you are going to respond to my posts, at least read them first. Mandating a book is not the same as mandating that a book is authoritative in its subject.
You could mandate reading Karl Marx in a history class or even an economics class. It would be objectionable to mandate that Marx's writing must be accepted by teachers as authoritative and correct on the subject of economics.
The Dover school board tried to mandate "Pandas" as equivalent to a science text.
I just want to echo the correctness of your analysis and extend it.
The Dover case is clearly a case of an activist judge wanting to re-invigorate the bogus separation notion. Moreover, if the local mandate of religious tract or Siddartha were an establishment of religion then the federal government would be prevented by the first amendment from "making a law respecting [that] an establishment of religion."
The fact that the establishment clause has been deliberately misinterpreted in this backwards way is a major reason these over heated debates are taking place across the nation. Whether the view is popular or not, the first civil right is a guarantee that local religious establishments will not be messed with by the federal government. How we got to where a certain group of citizens could send down federal lightning bolts on any local opinion that strikes them as Christian is amazing.
Notice also that the local citizens of Dover took electoral action to make their science education consistent with the views of those defending evolution in this thread. But that is not good enough. We must re-build the Wall that never existed.