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.
Dogs have 78 chromosomes, far more than humans and more than any other diploid organism. The massive increase in information in the dog genome is due to the mechanism of selection, artificially accelerated by man**. Without the selection by man, the differences between the genomes of cats and dogs would be far less.
**Note the importance is in the mechanism and not the 'who' of the selecting, any selection at all whether natural, sexual, kin, or human selection would accomplish the same changes, albeit at different speeds and possibly in a different direction. If the dog species were in the wild they would be considered a 'ring-species'.
And all metazoans are still metazoans. What is your point?
My point was clear. What is yours?
Why are are you telling the punch line before the joke is fully set up?
Well stated. I urge everyone to read your post again.
Another thing you could have mentioned is that the Federal government routinely subsidized the construction of churches for something like the first 150 years of the republic.
The notion that even mentioning the possibility of ID in science class somehow constitutes the establishment of religion is preposterous. That such a notion is even taken seriously is cause for alarm.
Oh, and which document was it that mentioned something about a "Creator"?
Also, I really love the implication that this judge must be right because he anticipated the charge of judicial activism! Gosh, I can anticipate all the bogus arguments of the evolutionists, so I must be right too.
Stick the ACLU and DI in a locked room with a single baseball bat hanging from the ceiling.
Just don't ask me to clean up the mess.
This really is a non-question. The appearance of sequence has very much to do with time and surprisingly the 2LoT.
Thanks for the good word. These threads can get depressing. The Darwinists never stop pasting in their boilerplate until they've beaten all signs of anyone wanting to argue with them into the ground. When the dust clears, everyone else has abandoned the thread.
It has the opposite effect on me, and I suspect on many others who trouble to read these threads. Such fanaticism, such desperate repetition of the same mantras, only reveals how stubbornly closed-minded they are.
ID is not science, it is religion lite. To be more specific, it is the application of the wedge strategy which was designed to try to sneak creationism into schools after creation "science" was blown out of the water by the Supreme Court in 1987.
Now that ID has been blown out of the water in Dover, will there be some other strategy devised to achieve the same ends? (I can hardly wait.)
Would it be possible to see your work?
Long time ago; the canids diverged from the rest of the Carnivora 50 - 60 MY ago. Wolves, dogs and coyotes are all interfertile; there are reports of dog/jackal hybrids; a few unconfirmed reports of hybrids with other canids, and none with other non-canid carnivores.
Sequence is simply placement ordering of events. An event is a unitary isolated act entire unto itself.
This is one of those silly initial conditions I mentioned. Abiogenesis is just that, the development of what we would consider life from self replicating non-life. No mention of DNA as the initial molecule other than by creationists.
It is true that the phrase is Jefferson's, but (like it or not) the activism was by the Supreme Court, not District Judge Jones.
The First Amendment says that there shall be no "establishment of religion" on a national level. The meaning of "establishment" historically is well known. It means a single state church, a single official church. The model the Founders were clearly thinking of was the Church of England, which at times the English monarchy had tried to foist on the American colonies as their official church.
No. The founders knew the history all too well. -- and much better than you.
They were quite aware of the strife of England's religious history:
Initially Roman Catholic, to Anglican Church, briefly Roman Catholic again, Anglican (again), Protestantism in the north, Charles I executed and the rise of Scottish Presbyterian, suppression of the Catholics and Anglicans, Charles II restored and the Anglican suppression of Roman Catholics and the Protestants (Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers and Methodists), ... and eventually the Act of Toleration that permitted the Protestant church(es) but still excluded Roman Catholics and Unitarians.
In light of this history, and hoping to avoid it; during the Convention in 1787, Charles Pinckney proposed the article to the Constitution:
. . .The Legislature of the United States shall pass no law on the subject of religion, nor touching or abridging the liberty of the press [n]or shall the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus ever be suspended, except in case of rebellion or invasion.
The proposal was accepted without debate and sent to the Committee of Detail, but only the "writ of habeas corpus" clause was incorporated into the Constitution.
Two years later in the debate on the the "Bill of Rights", the subject came up again. Madison (who initially opposed any "Bill of Rights") offered:
"The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretence, infringed."
Mr. Sherman thought the amendment altogether unnecessary, inasmuch as Congress had no authority whatever delegated to them by the Constitution to make religious establishments; he would, therefore, move to have it struck.
Mr. Benjamin Huntington said that "he feared, ... that the words might be taken in such latitude as to be extremely hurtful to the cause of religion. He understood the amendment to mean what had been expressed by the gentleman from Virginia; but others might find it convenient to put another construction upon it."
After objection to the word "national" and more debate, Mr. Samuel Livermore revived Gen. Pinckney's article:
"Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or infringing the rights of conscience."
Mr. Madison withdrew his motion, and the question was then taken on Livermore's motion, and passed in the affirmative, thirty-one for, and twenty against.
The House committee merged the language of both Madison's and Livermore's proposal:
"Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience."
And in the Senate:
"Congress shall make no law establishing articles of faith or a mode of worship, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion."
After conciliation in the conference committee, we got our present:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Thirty years later, in his commentaries, Justice Story wrote:
"The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. It thus cut off the means of religious persecution, (the vice and pest of former ages,) and of the subversion of the rights of conscience in matters of religion, which had been trampled upon almost from the days of the Apostles to the present age. The history of the parent country had afforded the most solemn warnings and melancholy instructions on this head; and even New England, the land of the persecuted puritans, as well as other colonies, where the Church of England had maintained its superiority, would furnish out a chapter, as full of the darkest bigotry and intolerance, as any, which could be found to disgrace the pages of foreign annals."
And we have Benjamin Franklin:
"When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support, itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one,"and
"If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish church, but practiced it upon the Puritans. These found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here [England] and in New England"
The debate was over shifting sectarian favor depending on which faction was in power. Distrusting future politicians, rather than allowing the possibility of support of any religion, The founders thought it best to exclude the subject from Congress altogether.
... and people who didn't like it were welcome to move to Rhode Island and Connecticut with Anne Hutchinson.
In other words, exiled. Interesting.
But there is nothing in the Constitution that would prevent them from reestablishing a religion in any state in the unlikely event that they chose to do so.
Other than the Fourteenth Amendment.
... and ARE CLEARLY NOT CONSERVATIVE on any of these issues.
One TRUE Scotsman ...
"It's also one of the dumbest. The entire purpose behind the construct of ID was to somehow slip creationism past the First Amendment radar detectors of the federal courts, while at the same time it would be enthusiastically supported by creationists' buying the books and tapes."
The evolutionists who sell this crap are the very same ones who cry foul if you point out that evolution has been identified by Marx as the scientific foundation of communism.
Here's their so-called logic:
Given: creationists argue for ID
Deduction: ID is creationism in disguise
For all you evolutionist geniuses out there, the same logic applies here:
Given: communists argue for evolution
Deduction: evolution is communism in disguise
There, I spoon fed it to you. Do you get it yet?
Translation: try as I might, I can't figure out how to rebut their arguments.
It has the opposite effect on me, and I suspect on many others who trouble to read these threads.
That's OK. I have a feeling changing your mind on anything requires a trepan.
Indeed, but only as long as time exists in which to place the ordered events and entropy gives the appearance of direction. One event will occur before another if and only if the flow of time is in that direction, if time is reversed in direction the event will come after rather than before. If there is no time, or time is directionless, then the concept of ordering or sequence has no meaning. This assumes that events can indeed occur at all without the existence of time. All events as we know them occur in a period of time, no matter how short. There are no events that take no time to occur (other than possibly the BB).
How about this one?
Given: In a textbook on creationism, the word creationism was replaced everywhere by ID, with no other significant changes; the result was a textbook on ID.
Deduction: ID is creationism in disguise
The 14th Amendment and "incorporation doctrine" (like it or not) puts any government actor under the Constitution.
Not to mention that the Pennsylvania Constitution prohibits any preference to any religious establishment.
Applying the Constitution's prohibition on federal establishment of religion to state and local issues is judicial activism in every sense of the phrase
Maybe you ought to take that up with the US Supreme Court or the State of Pennsylvania, they think otherwise ...
Judge Jones is following the law as established (again, like it or not).
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