Very good Narby, you have a good grasp of the issue before the court.
Members of the school board are on record saying precisely that their motivation *is* to insert religion into public schools. And the textbook they recommended was originally written in support of the explicitly religious "creationism" viewpoint, and the text was changed only to replace the word "creationism" with the words "Intelligent Design".
Now, you're falling down on the law. Motivation is not justiciable by federal courts, only actions are. The 1A prohibits the feds or states from "establishing religion". The Dover School Board has established no religion nor favored any religion over any other. And plain reading of the 1A would make the case farcical and it would be thrown out of court. Any conservative should question why this case is in federal court, it is a local issue to be decided by locals absent aby coecion that violates the Constitution.
The Discovery Institute, which is almost solely devoted to the ID issue has bailed out of this one. I'm sure they can see a defeat coming, and don't want to be tainted by it.
I don't attend mass at the DI, I attend mass at St James in Danielson, Ct.
You guys are going to lose this one. Badly.
Maybe, maybe not but if the court rules for the statists here, we all lose.
14'th Amendment. "Should" is another question, but that's why.
...absent aby coecion...
Looks like someone picked the wrong week to switch to decaf ;)
You suggest a false, even farcical, reading of the First Amendment. It doesn't prohibit only the establishment of a full and functioning religion complete with churches. It prohibits any law (and by extension of the 14th Amendment, any formal government policy) "respecting," an establishment of religion. "Respecting" is not a throwaway word. It means that anything like an establishment, or anything touching upon an establishment, is prohibited.
IOW it doesn't merely say you can't go all the way toward establishing religion, it says you can't go part of the way either.
It's also worth bearing in mind, which is frequently forgotten today, that "establishment of religion" had a much broader connotation in the American colonial and early republican context than it did in the European context.
The Europeans did typically, and in some cases still do, establish a particular church or denomination as the official state religion. This was almost never done in the colonies or the early American states. Virtually all "establishments of religion" in America were either multiple (more than one denomination was recognized as official and supported by the state or by taxes) or general (for instance the citizen might be able to specify without restriction which denomination his otherwise mandatory religion tax would go to).
In consequence of these uniquely American patterns of religious establishment the writers of the constitution would have, and in fact did, recognized the term as including general measures respecting the advancement, or inhibition, of religion, not just specific favors toward a chosen sect or denomination.
I think it's pretty clear that government policies tending to validate the existence of an "intelligent designer" advance religion.
Now if there are independent reasons for such policies (for instance that ID really is, on objective examination, a part of science) then there's no problem with that. This same issue came up concerning evolution back in the 70's, when some creationists were still trying to ban it outright. They argued in court that evolution either inhibited religion, or that it advanced the "religion of secular humanism," and therefore that it was illegal to teach it. Judges refused to consider this argument because, they noted, evolution clearly was a part of science, and therefore there was a valid secular purpose in teaching it in a science class. IOW it didn't matter if it incidentally advanced or inhibited religon, so long as that wasn't the purpose of principal effect of the policy.
In short it seems to me that the defendants will have to show a valid secular purpose, and that this purpose was the intent of the school board, and will be the principal effect of the policy, or they will lose.
I think they will lose, and rightly so.