It was not merely Judge John E. Jones who ruled against teaching “intelligent design” (ID), a thinly veiled surrogate for “creation science,” in public schools. The citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania, exercised the power of the ballot to ensure that their city did not appeal Kitzmiller. If the case had reached the Supreme Court of the United States, the justices possibly would have split 5-4 in favor of allowing public schools to teach ID.
Today ID lost its prospect of winning in the Supreme Court: Justice Antonin Scalia, Known For Biting Dissents, Dies At 79. As noted in the Wikipedia article on Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), in which the court nailed shut the coffin of creation science,
Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, dissented, accepting the Act’s stated purpose of “protecting academic freedom” as a sincere and legitimate secular purpose. They construed the term “academic freedom” to refer to “students’ freedom from indoctrination”, in this case their freedom “to decide for themselves how life began, based upon a fair and balanced presentation of the scientific evidence”.
Has quite a familiar ring, doesn’t it? The rhetoric of the ID movement was designed by a law professor, Phillip Johnson, to suit a creationism-friendly judge of the Law of the Land. This is indeed a sad day for ID, which already had acquired a moribund pallor.
I can only quote Clarence Darrow, from his book The Story Of My Life:
Thank all the gods that Scalia is dead.
There is not one other single person who has done as much damage to the United States in the 21st century.
RIP Justice Scalia. Whether or not you agree with his presupposition of “original intent,” in my view he was probably the most learned man and best writer on the bench. His prose was clear and reasoning sharp – if you bought “original intent.”
He was a gifted rationalizer, the kind of acute legal mind that could explain, in clear, cogent and entertaining language, how A was guilty of taking a bribe from B, who was NOT guilty of bribing A.
I find it amusing that Scalia’s interpretation of “original intent” just happened to coincide with the Republican party line without exception.
Did someone say they are happy this man died. Thats wicked and unwelcome .
Please go away from origin discussions.
IFirst the Judges should not be ruling free nations.
In Canada and America this is a serious threat and result against the peoples right to rule ourselves.
I understand this man tried to keep the people in control of the nation as opposed to the others trying for dictatorship, their will/whim, and inferior ideas of Anglo-American jurisprudence.
I susoect he was selected because of Italian/possibly Catholic identity along wioth a sense of “conservative” instincts. All judges are selected with a eye to identity. A other injustice, robbery, and reason for a inferior court these days in both nations.
Anyways.
All creationism needs is Judges who obey the contract and the constition from it of the people in how they are governed .
WE don’t need to KNOW judges opinions before appointed. Its illegal if they knew the law.
The case for the people to demand that the truth be taught in any class where subjects of origins comes up is absolute.
Any censorship is impossible, illegal, immoral, absurd.
The present censorship is immoral, illegal, gross incompetent jurisprudence.
Creationism should strive for great great cases to overthrow the entire concept of state censorship on any subjects that deal with truth in public institutions.
Anyways. Sad to hear of this mans death. I don’t know if he was still on the bench.
I suspect the present president would illegally pick someone who they know would vote their way on the important, yet few, issues. Also a identity wopuld be selected and a rejection of identity for those to enforce THE LAW.
A every evil thing in American government history.
Yet the bad people can be beaten by accusing them and taking them to court, of the people and actual court on all issues.
Judicial revolution from the people TIME has come today.
This man has a great heritage and future while the others on the bench do not.
As i said he no doubt was a quota but he beat that flaw with a superior judgement of what the law is and why people must obey it but not obey wrong law. Oppose it as he did.
To his lovers and friends salut from Canada. We lost a good guy but will win his cause.
Yep. Just like whenever christians pray for guidance, god always happens to agree with whatever they were already planning to do.
Amazing.
On a more political note, I would consider it impossible for Obama to get a Republican Senate to consider any candidates this year.
Next year looks pretty hazy from here. If we return a Republican Senate and a Democrat President, who knows how long this stalemate would continue. Conversely, it’s considered easily possible for the Democrats to retake control of the Senate. If some nitwit like Cruz is elected, this guarantees no nominees will be approved for a very long time.
If both Senate and Presidency are of the same party this November, since it’s expected that at least 2 and perhaps 3 justices will be appointed during the next administration, we will see the winning party construct a Supreme Court that will rule according to that party’s lines for perhaps decades.
With the SCOTUS now reduced to a straight party-line political body, we could be looking at a long, cold night in America.
In all the many trillions of prayers issued by 2 millennia of Christians, I’ve never EVER heard of their god(s) telling the supplicant that his opinion is wrong.
I take that as an explanation of why the Republican Senate cannot afford to play a game of obstruction now. We saw with the last budget bill that the GOP leadership recognizes that independent voters are sick of seeing ideology trump government. If they were to get in the way of Obama now, he could go on the stump with the issue, and do severe damage to Republican candidates without campaigning for the Democrats.
It seems to me that Obama can ensure confirmation by nominating a not-too-liberal Hispanic. He’s not above playing that game.
Tom English,
I do some work for a fixed capacity business. One thing that is not obvious to all is that to raise the mean you don’t necessarily have to beat it, you just have to be better than what you displace.
Does it seem odd to anybody else that the cause of Scalia’s death hasn’t been disclosed?
I have some (probably not that) funny suggestions, but I suppose now is not the time.
No.
They did say “natural causes”, so they seem to have ruled out murder, etc.
I doubt that. While Justices Scalia and Thomas would back it, I suspect that at least one of the other 3 right-wing justices would vote to uphold Judge Jones’s ruling. After all, Jones himself is no flaming liberal, and he said in his recollections that he knew early that he was going to have to rule for the plaintiffs. This is pretty clear in light of rulings like Edwards vs. Aguillard and Lemon vs. Kurtzman.
The DI strategy would work with a court that had three more justices of the Scalia/Thomas stripe. That might happen with an 8-year presidency of a sufficiently right-wing Republican such as Cruz, Rubio, or Carson.
But haven’t we established in the other thread that all causes are natural?
Did he suffer from sudden hearing loss?
One has to distinguish between “natural” as used by philosophers and scientists, and “natural” as used by the news media.
The Panda died?
Do you suppose this to be generalizable across all Christians?
Please, God.
So you acknowledge that as a strategy, science has failed the DI so they only have the law left? Then we agree on some things it seems.
I’m just wondering what drugs he might have been doing that night.
A 79-year-old Catholic? Nothing entertaining, I’m sure.
Well, he was at a party that night.
Maybe he took a dose of Viagra to be able to get it up with some young thing then had a heart attack from the guilt.
Whoever “found’ him in the morning would certainly try to cover that up.
But honestly, there’s no reason to think he died of anything other than plain old age, in spite of my hope that he died screaming as his friend Satan bore him off to hell.
walto,
He was good friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I’m sure they did the good stuff.
The political calculus gets quite complex here. You mention one element – that truly independent voters whose votes haven’t been gerrymandered into meaninglessness, might swing a few elections away from Republicans if the Republicans refuse to bring any nomination to a vote. I’d say, probability low.
Then you have the list of important cases pending – affirmative action, abortion, voting rights, etc. A SCOTUS voting 4-4 (which would surely be the case in all of these) means the lower court ruling would stand — and the lower courts ruled for the Republicans in both the abortion and affirmative action cases. Alternatively, SCOTUS could elect to postpone these until there is a full Court.
But that might be a long time. Certainly not for this session, and probably not for the next one either, even if the next President nominates someone quickly. And who that President might be is a long way from decided. My local newspaper characterizes the races so far as worthy people with their heads in the Right place (emphasis on Right), against a crazed socialist or a crook about to be indicted!
(I noticed a poll a while back where a new record was set of the percentage of voters who would regard the enemy party’s victory as an irrecoverable catastrophe. Given this level of intense polarization, I wonder how many truly independent “undecideds” there are.)
At any rate, both McConnell and the Republican candidate field together agree that no Justice should be appointed until after the next President. I’m confident Obama will nominate someone with fabulous credentials, whose nomination will never come to a vote. Maybe you’re right and that might sway some voters, but an Obama appointment can swing the Court for a generation.
I’m too old and have seen too many pendulum swings to believe any president will be a catastrophe.
Look at all the supposed catastrophes caused by bad decisions. Relations with Russia? Reset, Reboot, Back to the usual.
War in the middle east? Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, ISIS, Al Quada, Turkey, Iran, SA. Not our doing. Been simmering for centuries.
Banking fiasco? Policies fully supported by all parties. Because the bubble kept the economy humming.
Except no one was trying to have ID taught in schools. The Dover SB just had a statement read and pro-ID materials available to students.
ID will win because, unlike evolutionism, it can be tested and it does not require one to prove a negative to refute it. The next Court case there will be questions asked of the top evolutionists there that they cannot answer and that will expose evolutionism as the nonsense it is. Simple questions like “How can we test the claim that ATP synthase evolved via natural selection, drift and neutral construction?” will blow the lid off of everything you guys hold sacred.
petrushka,
I agree with you here. The question in my mind is there a better process to elect a president. I don’t believe we have had strong leadership in the white house since Bill Clinton. I cringe at 20 trillion in debt and see that it is equally shared by both parties. Now I look at all the choices we have and don’t fell very confident that any one of them is well qualified to lead the largest economic power in the free world. Maybe public election of officials should be limited.
Bingo. Like two uniformed cents.
Maybe it could be arranged so that you could just pick them?
Over at Sandwalk, Larry Moran posted this link
http://www.belcherfoundation.org/edwards_v_aguillard_dissent.htm
But the IDists will never stop trying to fool others into thinking ID != creationism.
Funny they only manage to fool other creationists
Hope your are right but we have never had a guy like Cruz.
Define intelligent.
It has already been defined. Buy a dictionary- geez.
Americans did not directly vote for senators for the first 125 years of the Federal Government. The Constitution, as it was adopted in 1788, stated that senators would be elected by state legislatures.
https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/17th-amendment/
Maybe one of the questions asked of any SC candidate should be whether wavelength equals frequency. That will at least rule out morons with the low intelligence of Joe G and people like him.
See, I disagree. What we need are more morons in government, not less.
Yes, but for some reason people won’t vote for openly atheistic politicians. 😉
Joe Felsenstein,
Emphasis added. I wish that I’d written conceivably, and also that I’d ended the sentence with “as science.” At any rate, I’m painfully aware that there are legal scholars with detailed knowledge of the individual justices. I could use Google Scholar to search for articles that discuss how the Supremes might have responded to Kitzmiller, had the case reached them on appeal. But I haven’t bothered. The upshot is that I don’t want to make stronger statements than I’ve earned the right to make.
The conservatives might have found that it was an error for Judge Jones to address whether or not ID is science (even though both sides requested it), and yet have upheld his decision that the Dover school board entangled church and state unconstitutionally. I won’t feign competence to assess how likely that would have been. But I will say that it’s not a stretch of the imagination.
This seems to be in the process of changing. In Europe, openly atheistic candidates are commonly elected — indeed, their religious orientation or lack of it isn’t regarded as relevant to their ability to carry out the duties of their office. In the US, we see that Bernie Sanders is getting plenty of votes. Religious sanity probably won’t be a reality in the US in my lifetime, but the writing is on the wall.
Flint,
If the US ever models Europe the US is doomed.
Tom English,
Please present the evidence that both sides wanted a judge to determine if ID is science. The judge was fooled by a literature bluff and knew nothing of science
As you move up from trial to district to appellate to Supreme Court, the decisions are based less on the law and more on the politics. The Supreme Court has been deciding important cases along party lines for quite a while now. Nobody is going to claim that the law, considered generally, is Republican or Democrat. Instead, the Constitution (especially in social issue contests) is a lot like the Bible – it can be found to say, beyond any honest doubt, whatever you wish it says.
You only need to read Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas to learn that in his sincere opinion as a strict constructionist legal scholar, his religious views trump the Constitution. How DARE the Constitution grant equal rights to minorities he doesn’t like — which he compared directly with child molesters!
So I agree with you that each Justice can “find” that the law and Constitution ratifies his prejudices. But I agree with Joe that only Scalia (and Thomas, the mini-Scalia) would have been guaranteed to support the creationists. Kennedy is often sensible, and even Roberts sometimes recognizes the dangers of creating classes of citizens denied basic rights by judicial fiat.
Yes, but some parts of doom are actually quote pleasant, the standards of living are high, and much of the culture is admirable.
Frankie, this sort of thing happens all the time. There have been countless thousands of cases where judges (or arbitrators, or mediators, or regulatory adjudication committees, etc.) have been obliged to make calls based on science. In these cases, the judge is expected to do his homework enough to understand the scientific basics, and pay careful attention to scientists testifying for both sides.
And the decision in such cases isn’t a scientific decision, it’s a legal decision. Judge Jones didn’t need to understand biochemistry to recognize that a religious doctrine was being fobbed off as a scientific claim. He correctly noted that whether or not ID was scientific, it simply could not be decoupled from its fundamentally religious core.
Flint,
The news has already shown that I guessed wrong about Republican obstructionism. The way that Senator Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) fabricated a “standard practice over the past 80 years” was hilarious. As for gerrymandering of congressional districts — a huge problem, indeed — I don’t see the relevance to the senatorial races.
I hope that Obama makes the Republican senators pay a dear price at the polls for this. And if it were McCain in the White House, contending with Democratic senators, I would say much the same.
You’re right, the Gerrymandering isn’t a factor (though I live in a state so red most politicians run unopposed in November, or with token opponents even the newspapers don’t mention.)
I am dubious that Obama can extract much of a price for Senate obstructionism. I think the number of voters who would switch parties from their usual practice is small. And every politician of both parties recognizes the importance of the next Justice, especially in a court that votes so consistently along party lines. Another Scalia, and the clock might be turned back for a generation or two.
So it’s a matter of nothing to lose here. If Obama can get a nominee approved, the Republicans consider this so devastating they can only block him and pray that the next President (and Senate) are Republicans, and they can perhaps appoint as much as a 7-2 majority for the foreseeable future.
To some degree, I think the Court itself is responsible for this polarization, for voting party lines on nearly every important case. Quite rightly, the Senate sees the SCOTUS as a mini-Senate, a purely political body, without the need to run for re-election.
Does Intelligence require intelligent design ?
It may be good news for Hillary if she ends up the nominee , any Sanders’ voters who claim there is no difference between Clinton and Republicans will have a concrete ,immediate example of the difference.
I realize that, Mung (probably everybody here does). I don’t take that to have been a good thing, myself. I’d like to see our democracy be more direct, not less. In fact, I’m not a huge fan of of representative government in any form–it’s just hard to do without it in giant countries like the U.S.
Something like 15 percent of Americans respect congress, and yet 95 percent of senators and congressmen get re-elected.