Replies

This is not the action of a conservative judge.

I've stayed out of all this, but I have an hour to kill, and was curious:

Your assertion seems, on the face of it, self-evidently incorrect.

A small group of people with an agenda got elected, then proceeded to tell teachers how to teach.
The parents then took steps, including a lawsuit, to stop them.
The parents won the lawsuit, and indeed also voted the folks out.

What am I missing here?

I keep imaging what if some muslim folks got elected to a majority on a school board, and were to mandate the teaching of some Islamic "truths". Aren't I correct in assuming you'd take exactly the same steps?

Voting them out is fine. Bringing a lawsuit was not.

As for the school board forcing something on the teachers, normally the purpose of a school board is to represent the town and the parents.

Of course school boards can sometimes behave badly, but so can unionized teachers in the public schools.

What am I missing here?

Nothing, you're right on the money. All anyone needs to do is bother to read the following excerpt from the judge's decision, from pp. 137-138:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Judicial activism is when judges make up law that doesn't exist. Judge Jones followed precedent every step of the way in his jurisprudence; in point of fact he had no choice; to do otherwise would have been an act of the very "judicial activism" for which so many of his detractors have such contempt. The only "activists" in this case were the nutballs on the school board who lied and connived to change the science curriculum to suit their personal religious beliefs and preferences, and the dorks in the anti-Evo PR organizations and law firms who egged them on.