Posted on 01/09/2006 8:26:54 AM PST by PatrickHenry
If there’s anything to be learned from the intelligent design debate, it’s that branding “activist judges” is the hobby of bitter losers.
For those who care about the fight over evolution in biology classrooms, Christmas came five days early when the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District ruling was handed down. In his decision, Judge John E. Jones III ruled that not only is the theory of intelligent design religion poorly dressed in science language, teaching it in class is an outright violation of the First Amendment.
The ruling was a concise and devastating demonstration of how law, precedent and evidence can come together to drive complete nonsense out of the courtroom. But if the aftermath of the event proves anything, it proves that nine times out of 10, if someone accuses a judge of being an “activist,” it is because he disagrees with the ruling and wants to make it clear to like-minded followers that they only lost because the liberals are keeping them down. Gratuitous overuse has, in just a few short years, turned the phrase “judicial activism” from a description of an actual problem in the legal system into a catch-all keyword for any ruling that social conservatives dislike.
During the months between the initial suit and the final decision, a high-powered law firm from Chicago volunteered some of its best to represent the plaintiffs pro bono, defenders of evolution and intelligent design mobilized, and few people really cared other than court watchers, biology nerds and a suspicious number of creationist groups. The trial went well for the plaintiffs: Their witnesses and evidence were presented expertly and professionally, and it never hurts when at least two of the witnesses for the defense are caught perjuring themselves in their depositions. Advocates for teaching actual science in school science classes were fairly confident that Jones was going to rule in their favor.
When it came, the ruling was significant enough to earn a slightly wider audience than the aforementioned court watchers, biology nerds and creationists. What drew interest from newcomers was not the minutiae of the trial, but the scope of Jones’ ruling and the scorn for the Dover School Board’s actions that practically radiated off the pages. He ruled both that intelligent design was a religious idea, and that teaching it in a science class was an unconstitutional establishment of religion by the state. He didn’t stop there, however.
“It is ironic,” he wrote, “that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the intelligent design policy.”
Such harsh language might provoke some sympathy for intelligent design advocates, if they hadn’t immediately demonstrated how much they deserved it by responding — not with scientific arguments for intelligent design or legal precedent to contradict Jones’ ruling — but with ridiculous name-calling. The Discovery Institute, the leading center of ID advocacy, referred to Jones as “an activist judge with delusions of grandeur.” Bill O’Reilly also brought out the “A” word on his show. Richard Land, spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and noted drama queen, declared him the poster child for “a half-century secularist reign of terror.” The American Family Association, having apparently read a different ruling than the rest of America, insisted that judges were so eager to keep God out of schools that they would throw out even scientific evidence for Him. Funny how so many creationist groups seemed to have missed the memo that intelligent design isn’t supposed to be about God at all.
It was depressingly predictable that the intelligent design crowd would saturate the Internet with cries of judicial activism regardless of the actual legal soundness of the ruling. In only a few years, intellectually lazy political leaders have morphed an honest problem in the judiciary that deserves serious debate into shorthand for social conservatism’s flavor of the week. The phrase has been spread around so much and applied to so many people that it only has meaning within the context of someone’s rant. It is the politico-speak equivalent of “dude.”
Only when one learns that Jones was appointed by George W. Bush and had conservative backers that included the likes of Tom Ridge and Rick Santorum can one appreciate how indiscriminately the term is thrown around. Jones is demonstrably a judicial conservative. In fact, he’s the kind of strict constructionist that social conservatives claim to want on the bench. Their mistake is in assuming that the law and their ideology must necessarily be the same thing.
In the end, no one could defend Jones better than he did himself. He saw the breathless accusations of judicial activism coming a mile away, and refuted them within the text of the ruling. In his conclusion he wrote:
“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 intelligent design, 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.”
Jones knew his name would be dragged through the mud and issued the correct ruling anyway. One can only hope that the utter childishness of the intelligent design response will alienate even more sensible people, and that the phrase “judicial activism” will from now on be used only by those who know what they’re talking about. No bets on the latter.
Dave is correct because there is no law granting homosexuals constitutional rights based on their sexual lifestyle. the us Constitution is the law of the land and states may not enact laws in gerogation of those federal constitutional rights. Doesn't mean they don't do it anyway.
So just where did canines and cats diverge? Besides, they have a different number of chromosomes.
My bottom line is that any attempts to divine the intent of the 14th Amendment other than its actual wording are not in keeping with a strict constitutionalist. That wording prohibits states from making any law abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. It does not grant any exceptions. This results in the states facing the same limitations regarding deprivation of individual rights as the federal government, to include the U.S. Constitution. Even if this was an unintended consequence with respect to the legislators that created it, this still holds true.
Good post! The problem with asserting judicially enforcable rights under the 9th Amendment is that two claimed rights can contradict one another. Some libertarians argue that the 9th grants federal judicial enforcement power on unenumerated rights. But what happens when two claimed rights contradict one another, or when an unenumerated right conflicts with an enumerated one?
Under this reading of the 9th, an unborn baby can't have a right to life without pregnant women losing their right to abortion, and vice-versa. Blacks can't have a right to be served at a racist restaurant owner's lunch counter without the owner losing his right to choose for himself whom to serve, and vice-versa. Gays can't have a right to marry one another without the voters losing their right to decide the definition of marriage, and vice-versa.
In all the above cases, I refer to judicially enforced rights, claimed under the 9th Amendment. The court can't grant one without denying the other.
The best understanding of the 9th seems to be that it was intended to leave states (and their voters) free to recognize unenumerated rights if they so chose, and to bar the federal government, including the federal courts, from interfering with them. In other words, the Supreme Court could not deny or disparage other rights if granted.
It sounds really nice to say that we as citizens have every right we might imagine, but at many points such rights conflict. I'd prefer the legislative branch to the judicial in sorting out these rights.
So those in the minority should never have any rights?
It's an inevitable consequence of the interplay between genetic variation and the real world.
It would actually take divine intervention to *prevent* natural selection from occurring any time heritable phenotypic variation is present in a population.
I'm outta here for suppertime! I appreciate your willingness to debate in good faith. Have a good evening! We'll likely cross swords again sometime!
"Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?" - Mark Twain
This is wrong. You do need to address this. bobdsmith has very effectively shown that the same arguments used to dismiss, say, dinosaur to bird evolution (not accepted by most creationists) make the same amount of sense (not much, admittedly) when used against the wolf-to-poodle evolution most creationists profess to accept.
The ICR version [my paraphrase]: "So one day a snake gives birth to a bird. But where is there another little bird for it to mate with?"
The bobdsmith version: "Have you ever seen a wolf give birth to a poodle? What would be the chances of a male poodle and a female poodle coming into existance at the same time and then mating?"
I am not an evolutionist.
That doesn't get you out of the problem. That gets you into it.
I have no problem with the fact that dogs have been domesticated and have been breeded by men in such a fashion that different lineages result in vastly different appearances and traits, but they are all still dogs.
You have the problem that the dopey creationist strawman which supposedly precludes the kinds of evolution you don't accept also precludes the kinds you do. You need to address this.
Dave
WTP?
Especially with so much Conservative support for Gary Hart's and Andrew Young's Patriot Act.
Brilliant point.
Which will be ignored, as usual.
What is the likelihood that this ignorant question was already asked in this very thread, and answered in my post #114, and you didn't bother to read the thread first before diving in?
Oh, right, the likelihood of that is "certainty".
And what is the likelihood that you have already asked this same question and already had it answered before in this post, eleven short days ago? You can't even claim not to have seen it, because you responded to it.
So why are you now dishonestly pretending to not know the answer to your question? And why are you dishonestly pretending that we responding to such questions with "nothing but silence", as you falsely claim in this same post:
Evolutionists are great at speaking in very broad terms about small changes over long periods of time, but when forced to look at what would be required at some particular point when a new species could appear, there is nothing but silence or unsupported claim that such a specific event is not required for evolution to be true.
He says that there is "nothing but silence" from evolutionists in response to questions about "what would be required" for evolutionary change. But not only is this false, HE MAKES HIS SNOTTY FALSE CLAIM ATTACHED TO A QUESTION THAT HE *KNOWS* WE'VE ALREADY ANSWERED RECENTLY.
Just how dishonest *does* someone have to be to be an anti-evolution creationist, anyway?
I've always thought the Puritans were the way they were out of simple fear. They were so afraid of their immortal souls they began living in fear of life. Seems to fit you typical Creationist just as well.
Your memory is entirely accurate. See post #334. And it was a mere eleven days ago...
How can you prove it was 11 days ago? Maybe the speed of light has been slowing down. < /creationist mode>
Another perfect analogy is that the English language descended from the ancestral language of Latin.
According to the goofy creationist argument this must have been impossible, unless there came a time when suddenly a new generation of people spoke English and couldn't understand the Latin that their parents were speaking...
Yet again, the "clue for the clueless" is that these things happen very gradually, such that the changes which are introduced in any one generation are too small to cause insurmountable problems or incompatibilities, and yet over large periods of time the small per-generation differences accumulate to the point where the grand total change (in language, or species) are so large (when comparing starting point to ending point) that the final result is almost unrecognizable compared to the original starting point.
This concept is so simple and obvious that even a child can grasp it, but for some reason the anti-evolution creationists never manage to wrap their brains around it. Go figure.
Another instructive point of the language analogy is that French, Spanish, German, and other languages *also* have descended from Latin roots, as well as English. The means by which this occurs -- that is, how multiple different languages descended from a common original language -- are the same means by which lineages of living things can give rise to multiple descendants (e.g., the original primates gave rise to apes *and* monkeys *and* lemurs *and* humans, among many others). Species not only change, they *split*. Thus the "tree of life", which includes many branchings.
Are there recognizable degrees of dishonesty? Maybe so, but for one who persists in being a creationist after significant exposure to to the information presented in these threads, I'd say 100% dishonesty is pretty close.
Fine by me. If he/she/it wants to keep convincing the lurkers that anti-evolution creationists are dishonest ignoramuses, I have no problem with that.
I'll keep doing my part by pointing just *how* dishonest and ignorant the posts are.
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