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.
"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."
I agree completely. And like you, I sometimes dream about reaching these folks through reason, but its a tough nut to crack.
By the way, did you read my article called The Myth of the Blind Watchmaker at http://RussP.us/Dawkins.htm ?
I guess that whole "Civil War-Reconstruction-Jim Crow" thing was just a rumor ...
You're horrible and will probably rot in hell.
"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."
Creationism is a specific form of ID, but that does not mean that ID is creationism. By the same token, a motorcycle is a type of a vehicle, but not all vehicles are motorcycles. Funny how evolutionists seem to have so much trouble with this simple fact.
If you are indeed correct that no changes were made other than a global search-and-replace of "creationism" with "ID" (which I doubt), and if the book still made sense, then apparently they were using the word "creationism" where "ID" was more appropriate. In that case, they should have used ID in the first place, and their revision was perfectly reasonable.
You are a shameless liar. I seldom cut and paste, and I can name a dozen others who write responses that are composed on the spot. Even those who post prepared responses do so only once or twice a thread, and only in response to tired and easily refuted arguments. You have to realize that we don't give a hoot how ignorant you remain. Our goal is to prevent FR from being a mirror image of DU, a place where ignorance goes unchallenged.
"Our goal is to prevent FR from being a mirror image of DU, a place where ignorance goes unchallenged."
That's a real hoot! I'll bet you won't find much debate about evolution over at DU! Maybe that's where you belong.
Speak for yourself, newbie.
No, I hadn't read it, but I just did.
I liked your point about beneficial vs harmful mutations, especially this bit I have extracted:
"The other side of the equation, which is often ignored, is that harmful mutations obviously work against survival. So a key input to even the simplest evolution model or simulation would have to be the ratio of beneficial to harmful mutations . . . .
"Like most evolutionists, Dawkins never even mentions this ratio. He discusses the overall mutation rate, but the significance of the ratio of beneficial to harmful mutations never seems to occur to him. Or perhaps he simply avoids the issue because it does not help his cause. Clearly, the rate of harmful mutations exceeds the rate of beneficial mutations . . . . But what is the ratio? Common sense suggests it is probably rather high. Imagine a random bit flip in the binary executable code of a computer operating system (e.g., Linux). What are the chances that it will improve the functioning of the system? Obviously very small. And what are the chances that it will be harmful? Obviously much higher. Perhaps several orders of magnitude higher."
I have pointed out on numerous threads that as some of the more intelligent ID exponents have argued, the odds against developing the complexity we see today, on both the macro and micro levels, is too astronomically high to be conceivable, even given the enormous size and age of the universe. You add a nice touch to this.
The only problem with your answer is that it avoids the response.
Which came first, ZERO or something?"
something.
I saw the hand of God in the Bucs - 'skins point spread.
So if I write a textbook about motorcycles, and change the word 'motorcycle' everywhere to the word 'vehicle', I'd have a textbook about vehicles? As in 'Harley Davidson is the leading American manufacturer of vehicles'?
If you are indeed correct that no changes were made other than a global search-and-replace of "creationism" with "ID" (which I doubt), and if the book still made sense, then apparently they were using the word "creationism" where "ID" was more appropriate. In that case, they should have used ID in the first place, and their revision was perfectly reasonable.
Doubt all you want. the textbook was called Of Pandas and People; it was written as a textbook on creationist biology; but after Evans vs. Aguillard, they simply did a global find/replace, and turned it into a textbook on ID. The revision was done purely to try to avoid the legal bar against teaching creationism in biology class.
It's in the Dover trial record; see Barbara Forrest's testimony.
No, of course I don't like it, and neither does any other conservative. The Supreme Court has gone berserk over the past 50 or 60 years, and badly needs to be fixed.
And, yes, I am quite aware of the history you sketch. It has little or nothing to do with the meaning to the word "establishment" in the Constitution. We aren't writing books here, we are getting at the nub of the matter.
Frankly, it's sick to have people claiming to be conservatives celebrating the work of activist SCOTUS judges over the years.
I won't go that far. Janice Brown first, then Judge Jones.
Or he got some skin on the underdog.
"So if I write a textbook about motorcycles, and change the word 'motorcycle' everywhere to the word 'vehicle', I'd have a textbook about vehicles? As in 'Harley Davidson is the leading American manufacturer of vehicles'?"
You missed my point (once again). I said that if the find/replace did not invalidate the text, then it was perfectly reasonable. Your attempt at a counter-example *does* invalidate the text.
No, you miss my pojnt. If you can write an entire textbook about one term, and then replace it by the other term without invalidating it, then the two terms are in effect synonyms; one is not a subset of the other.
My daughter attends a public high school. One of the questions she has to answer as part of her homework tonight is: "What are considered the three basic teachings of Jesus?" Even a die hard atheist could provide the "correct" answer without being offended or phoning up the ACLU. I would not be offended either, if the school came up with better questions that did not reference Jesus at all. Guess it's one of the benefits of living in a red state.
After debating with evolutionists, you quickly realize that they have no interest whatsoever in the ratio of harmful to beneficial mutations or the "sharpness" of the natural selection "filter." In fact, they consistently demonstrate that they don't even understand the problem. They are clueless about the mathematics involved.
But why should they bother themselves with such details, since they "know" right from start that "all the empirical evidence supports the theory," and "no evidence exists for ID."
When you get right down to the nub of it, dogmatic evolutionism is the flip side of the dogmatic coin, with creationism on the other side. Evolutionists have much more in common with dogmatic creationists than they do with intelligent design advocates.
That's never stopped anybody before ...
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