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To: Quark2005; WildHorseCrash
Now, on the other hand, if a parent unwittingly paid Ken Ham to educate their kid in science...

In other threads I've suggested that the Dover case would had been better fought in state court, on fraud charges, and in the PA Legislature, on high crimes and misdemeanors.

Specifically, claiming that ID is science is a fraud upon the students. The taxpayers paid to get a science education, and instead they're getting pseudoscience.

I'm assuming that PA is like VA, in that the Legislature has passed laws mandating the formation of school boards, and mandating that these boards draw up curricula. By including pseudoscience in the science curriculum, these elected officials are violating the requirements of their office. That's the definition of high crimes.

The advantage of this approach is that applies to subjects that have no establishment clause entanglement, like Ebonics-as-Engllish, or Afrocentrism-as-History.

176 posted on 03/23/2006 9:12:11 AM PST by Virginia-American
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To: Virginia-American
The taxpayers paid to get a science education, and instead they're getting pseudoscience.

That would be a tough case, I think. The Dover debacle amounted to a one minute statement read once a year in a science class - it would be difficult to make the case that this exercise costs the taxpayers anything significant.

I'm just glad that a conservative, religious judge made the final call (if a liberal or atheist judge had done so, the public perception of the result may have turned out quite differently).

181 posted on 03/23/2006 9:22:25 AM PST by Quark2005 (Confidence follows from consilience.)
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To: Virginia-American
That's an interesting approach, but the problem that I see it is that impeachment only cures the symptom -- the particular set of board members who buy into the idea that this junk (ID, creationism, etc.) should be taught to children -- and not the disease -- the junk itself.

With impeachment, nothing will prevent another group of dimwits from doing the same thing, requiring another round of impeachments. (Or worse, if the dimwits succeed in getting enough dimwits elected to the legislature to prevent the impeachment.) By going the litigation route, it makes it very clear that the disease is excised, and anyone trying to do it again will be knocked down quickly.

240 posted on 03/23/2006 11:22:19 AM PST by WildHorseCrash
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