Category: Courts - Page 27

December 21, 2005

Judge throws book at Dover Board in ruling

On December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones III, In The United States District Court For The Middle District Of Pennsylvania, ruled that the Dover District School Board violated the US Constitution when they changed the 9th grade Biology curriculum to include Intelligent Design (ID).

Some of the members of the Board who voted for the change didn’t even know what ID was all about.

The Judge also took to task some members who lied under oath and tried to cover their tracks when the change caused some issues for the community.

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November 27, 2005

Is Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito a friend to religious liberty?

Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearing is going to start in January and one area he is sure to be questioned about is his legal views on the separation of church and state.

Unlike the failed nomination of Harriet Miers, Alito has a judical history to look at to see if he may be a friend of real religious liberty – one that supports the separation of church and state.

According to an AP report this weekend, Alito’s record on religious cases is all over the spectrum.

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November 6, 2005

End of Dover trial highlights danger of anti-science efforts

God didn’t put a man on the moon or wipe out a majority of the world’s diseases. Science did. Praying didn’t increase crop yields which allows us to raise much more food than we really need on low amount of acreage. Science did. Going to church isn’t going to help us find a cure for AIDS. Science will.

The recent defense of Evolution in Dover wasn’t some conspiracy of secular humanists bent on corrupting “our children” but was conducted by believers who find the truth of science to be much more important than their religious beliefs.

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November 2, 2005

Dover School Board grasping at straws

Well it had to happen. As the trial in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District comes to a close this week, the defendants are doing everything they can to save themselves from losing the case. This includes changing their testimony, selective memory, and the ever useful – attacking the media. The plaintiffs in the case also questioned the school board on their hiring of the Thomas More Law Center to represent them. The center states as one of their missions: Defending and promoting the religious freedom of Christians.

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October 21, 2005

More of the ID Show in Dover, PA

The cross examination of Behe highlights what is so wrong about Intelligent Design and the zeal of its supporters to get it wedged into school curriculums. They simply dismiss anything that doesn’t support their conclusions or they cry about being victims of politics.

Further on in testimony the discussion talked about one of the main charges ID’ers make against Evolution – that Evolution can’t be observed. ID’ers point out you can observe the “design”.

Michael Behe was asked if intelligent design is observable. Behe said it is. But when asked if he had witnessed newly designed structures appearing in the past five years. Behe said the designed structures that he’s written about are much older.

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October 19, 2005

ID’ers get their shot in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District

First up was Michael Behe, a Lehigh University biochemistry professor and author of “Darwin’s Black Box,” who is considered an expert on Intelligent Design (ID). He has written that “intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on proposed mechanisms of how complex biological structures arose,” but when asked to name the driving force behind the concept, Behe could not.

Contrast that with Evolution. Darwin named “natural selection” as its driving force.

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