Free Republic

When Virginia Governor Ralph Northam endorsed fourth-trimester abortions last week, nobody called for his resignation. His decision 35 years ago to masquerade, either in blackface or as a Klansman — which malefaction against taste Northam engaged in seems unclear — offends modern sensibilities to such a degree that his party, his predecessor, and nearly every presidential wannabe says he should step down. This says something more about us than him. Democrats did not always exhibit a zero-tolerance policy toward dressing up in white sheets. They once, at least in some parts of the country, demanded it from candidates. In 1924,...

In 1912 scientists thought they'd discovered the elusive missing link between human and ape. Found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, a set of intriguing skull and jaw fragments were later reconstructed by the British Museum into a human-like head with an ape-like jaw. In 1953 it turned out the find wasn't proof of anything—other than the skill of the still anonymous forger. The skull was a medieval human's. The jaw was an orangutan's. And the teeth were a chimp's.

In their series, "10 Days That Changed America", the History Channel will focus on the Scopes trial. As they put it, "The sensational courtroom battle between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow over the teaching of evolution in a small Tennessee town underscored a deep schism within the American psyche -- religion versus science, church versus state, elitism versus populism."

Neanderthals At It Again H.L. Mencken’s final report from the famous Scopes trial in Dayton Tennessee comes roaring down to us after 80 years as sharply edged as ever: "Let no one mistake [the trial] for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details.  It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.  Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock...

Since we have recently had the Dover trial, perhaps some on both sides will appreciate some great photos of the first "Monkey Trial", including some of the primary actors.

I think we should let the evolutionists have their way. They oppose any mention of creation in government schools, even rejecting the notion of Intelligent Design. They see the Scopes Trial of 1925 as the turning point for the upsurge in evolutionary legitimacy. While John Scopes was convicted for teaching evolution contrary to state law and had to pay a $100 fine, public opinion and educational monopoly turned toward evolution.1 One way to beat an opposing worldview is to force its proponents to live consistently with the position. Since Scopes was accused of teaching from the state-adopted textbook A Civic...

Terri Schiavo is dying. She is being killed. The culture of life lost this round to the gods of the cult of death entrenched in our courts, media, and other institutions. This was never, as liberals claimed, a constitutional crisis. It was, first, a question as to the definition of death. Up until now and throughout the Bible death was declared when autonomous respiration and heartbeat ceased and, as of late, when the brain-stem and brain were devoid of function. With the Schiavo case, popular culture has expanded death's contour and hastened its arrival by redefining death as the inability...

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- Since 2002, Dr. Kenneth Miller has been upset that biology textbooks he has written are slapped with a warning sticker by the time they appear in suburban Atlanta schools. Evolution, the stickers say, is "a theory, not a fact."

Seventy-nine years ago last summer, a legal carnival convened in the little town of Dayton, Tennessee, as the trial of John Scopes got under way. Banners and lemonade stands lined the streets. People joked that chimpanzees, brought to town to perform in sideshows, actually were in Dayton as witnesses for the trial. On one side was the American Civil Liberties Union, which had offered to pay the legal expenses of anyone who would challenge a Tennessee law that banned the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in public schools and universities. Twenty-four-year-old local science teacher John Scopes was recruited to...