Posted on 11/03/2005 11:39:36 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Not long into his cross-examination Wednesday, Dover schools Asst. Supt. Michael Baksa talked about a seminar he had attended about creationism in public schools.
The typically calm and confident administrator started his testimony with shaky hands and a weak voice as he explained to plaintiffs’ attorney Eric Rothschild that Supt. Richard Nilsen sent him to the Messiah College seminar on March 26, 2003.
Baksa had returned to the stand in a federal civil suit over Dover Area School District’s decision to include a mention of intelligent design in ninth-grade biology class. It was Baksa’s third appearance on the stand after being bumped by out-of-town witnesses for the defense.
Knowledge of the seminar wasn’t new. But the plaintiffs’ attorneys used it and other testimony from Baksa and school board President Sheila Harkins, who also testified Wednesday, to try to tie together events leading up to the science curriculum change and show that religion played a role in the board’s decision.
A policy that had a religious purpose would violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
Baksa testified that hours after attending the conference, he went to a Dover board retreat. According to previous testimony, board member Alan Bonsell said at the retreat that creationism should balance the teaching of evolution. Earlier in the trial, board members, former board members and Nilsen testified about notes made during board retreats in 2002 and 2003 at which Bonsell mentioned creationism and prayer in school.
After the retreat, Baksa said, he told Bertha Spahr, head of the science department, that Bonsell wanted to give another theory equal time to evolution in science class.
Baksa received a memo dated April 1, 2003, from then-Principal Trudy Peterman that said a board member wanted to give creationism equal time with evolution.
“My first reaction is, ‘She got it wrong,’” Baksa said, referring to Peterman’s use of the term creationism. But he didn’t approach either Spahr or Peterman to correct the information, he said.
A little more than a year after Peterman’s memo, controversy erupted during June 2004 board meetings when board members, and one board member’s wife, made religious comments while talking about buying new biology books.
During Wednesday’s questioning, Baksa corroborated some news coverage by saying he heard former board member Bill Buckingham talk about creationism, saying that “liberals in black robes” were taking away Christians’ rights and that the ninth-grade biology book was “laced with Darwinism.”
Baksa said Buckingham said something about a man dying on the cross 2,000 years ago but didn’t remember if the comment was made in 2003 during talks about “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance or in 2004 during discussion on the curriculum change.
He also said Buckingham made a comment about the country not being founded on Muslim beliefs but said he didn’t know when that was said.
Earlier Wednesday, Harkins testified she didn’t remember Bonsell talking about creationism or prayer during retreats. She said she heard Buckingham mention liberal judges but didn’t know whether his mention of a man dying 2,000 years ago on the cross came at a 2004 board meeting or in earlier discussions about the pledge.
She also said people in the audience were talking about creationism at the June meetings, while then-board member Jeff Brown talked about intelligent design.
“My recollection is it seems to me I was thinking Jeff was the first one to bring up mentioning intelligent design in the conversation,” she said. “I was thinking Alan, Noel (Wenrich) and Bill got in on the conversation.”
Baksa and Harkins both testified that, at those June meetings, they didn’t know what intelligent design meant.
In August 2004, before the October vote on the intelligent design statement, Baksa and others received e-mail from Stock and Leader lawyer Steve Russell. The district had asked him for advice about the pro-intelligent design textbook “Of Pandas and People.”
“Today I talked to Richard Thompson. . . . they refer to the creationism issue as ‘intelligent design,’” Russell wrote, referring to Dover’s lawyer from the Thomas More Law Center in Michigan.
After court, Thompson maintained that creationism and intelligent design were separate.
Russell’s concern, according to the e-mail, was about various talk for putting religion back into the schools.
Baksa said in court Wednesday that he considered Russell’s words as advising caution in using “Pandas.”
In the summer of 2004, the board decided not to spend taxpayer money on “Pandas” as a companion text. Baksa testified that Nilsen asked him to research how much 50 copies of “Pandas” would cost so the board could then give the information to donors.
Later that year, Alan Bonsell’s father, Donald, and members of former board member Buckingham’s church anonymously gave 60 copies of the book to the district.
Outside court, Thompson said the events simply coincided.
“I don’t think they’re connected,” he said. “I think it’s just happenstance. At that point, I don’t think they were connected. The only reason that’s brought up is because of the case that exists today.”
The plaintiffs’ attorneys declined to comment Wednesday.
Actually it is the creationists who believe they are 'smarter' than all the scientists that work every day in the fields that contribute to the ToE.
"Some of you have become bitter over the years and have lost everything in your repertoire except the ad hominem attack.
The repertoire of the evos here is not in any way reduced since science adds to the evidence every day. The ad homs are a reaction to the repeated use of the same debunked garbage. It is born of frustration not bitterness.
"Therefore I must ask you to refrain from addressing me unless you are able to maintain control over your emotions and conduct yourself in a civil manner.
May I suggest that you learn the ToE science uses rather than the strawman people like Hovind and Johnson have created. If you were to do that, I suspect you would receive fewer ad homs.
I don't think they like to be reminded that they constantly ally themselves with the ACLU to censor people (not to mention Morris Dees and Barry Lynn). Cultural Marxists are not conservatives.
I got a random selector model XLJ6352 right here in my shop. Looks like a cross between a wood stove and a violin bow.
I bow to it every morning and offer it a bowl of panther piss to appease its anger.
FReepmailed threats placemarker
Heaven has a stripper factory and a beer volcano -- not too hard to figure out.
Clearly "Flying Spaghetti Monsterism" is the One True Religion ™.
And I don't worry about getting nasty in freepmail either. I tell them if they don't like it, get out of my freemail queue.
People want simple solutions, especially ones that vindicate their inborn prejudices.
Careful.. If what you say is true, it is true of evolutionists even more.
Nonsense. Show me one evolutionist who refuses to acknowledge physical evidence simply because it doesn't fit with his personal cosmology. One.
That doesn't change the fact of evolution.
Now there we have a perfect example of compound problem involving the use of language and logic. Could it be an illustration of a simple solution vindicating an inborn prejudice?
Evolution is both a fact and a theory. It can be observed. The Theory is how that fact applies to the origin of species. Perhaps you were unaware of that?
Perhaps some of this could be cured by sending people ad museum.
Many people seem to worship the Ancient God Coca Cola; as evidenced by them putting money into one his many convient shrines.
*chuckling*
I'll dissect that one in detail later - the initial survey of errors is promisingly amusing.
Where do you find these things?
Archival Section of DarwinCentral™ Inventory Room.....
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