His critics labeled U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III a judicial activist for blocking a Pennsylvania school district’s attempt to pass off intelligent design as science, but in our book he’s a hero for upholding the constitutional separation of church and state.
Jones, featured speaker at a recent meeting of the Anti-Defamation League in Denver, was the target of more than mere invective: His life was threatened for ruling last December that the Dover Area School District could not teach intelligent design in biology class, calling it creationism in disguise. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that creationism in public schools violates the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
Indeed, the only “activists” in this mess were former Dover school board members, who unethically tried to foist their beliefs on students while attacking Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (and a considerable body of fossil evidence) with outright falsehoods.
After a six-week trial, Jones, a Republican appointed to the bench in 2002 by President Bush, denounced the “breathtaking inanity” of the attempt of several school board members to insert intelligent design into the science curriculum.
Although intelligent-design arguments “may be true, a proposition on which the court takes no position, ID is not science,” Jones ruled, and “violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation” and relies on “flawed and illogical arguments.”
He said, “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.”
During an interview in Denver, Jones said he was amazed that several board members who were religious repeatedly lied in court testimony. Jones said the purpose of the former board (voters sensibly ousted them from office last November) was to oppose the teaching of evolution. One board member ordered a mural of the evolution of man burned. As a condition for getting new biology texts, teachers had to agree not to post such murals in the future. Such a blatant disregard for science and the Constitution cost the Dover district more than $1 million in a final settlement – funds that could have enriched the education of the students.
Religious beliefs on the origins of life have their place in the church, synagogue or mosque. But in the public school classroom, science must rule.
