Christmas Present #2: So-called "Intelligent" Design goes from the school to the trash

After Dover, Pennsylvania's Republican schoolboard hijacked the local science curriculum in a painfully transparent attempt to inject christian teachings into public education, the Dover-area residents had their say. And threw the deceitful bastards out on their fundie ears. Those who subscribe to the radical notion that religion doesn't belong in public school, much less be passed off as "science," looked to the court to undo the damage. Thankfully, it more than obliged.

In a ruling that amounted to the jurisprudential equivalent of a bitch slap, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones not only rejected proponents' (unfounded) assertions that ID is science, but sawed them off at the knees for abusing their position to promote their thinly disguised religious agenda. Jones' was a lengthy opinion, but the AP kindly published these choice nuggets:

"We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause."

"Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs' scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator."

"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 ID, 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."

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic 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 ID Policy."

"The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory."

"After a searching review of the record and applicable case law, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community."

"Ill-informed faction?" "Breathtaking inanity?"

What's really breathtaking is finally seeing an (apparent) trend of honesty when dealing with the Evangeliban and its theocratic agenda.

I must've been an especially good boy this year.