Discovery [sic] Institute fellow John West has a long article at National Review praising the recently enacted Louisiana creationism law, which is of course disguised as a “protection” for “dissenting” teachers who are being persecuted by The Man. John Derbyshire, also at National Review, has an excellent response to it here, indicating that at least some prominent conservatives are fed up with the pseudoscience. (LGF, too.) According to West, the law simply gives teachers “a modest measure of protection” when they try to “question[]...the ‘consensus’ view on...scientific issues.” Of course, the law is more than that: it is an attempt to cleverly phrase an invitation to religious propagandists to use government-run, taxpayer-supported schools as a forum to teach religion to other people’s children.
To Derbyshire’s excellent analysis, I would add only the following.
I find it amusing that West first scoffs at “the usual suspects [who] denounc[e] the bill as a nefarious plot to sneak religion into the classroom”—but then goes on to write that we should not trust “to scientists the authority to determine the ‘facts’” because facts have implications for society: “If it really is a ‘fact’ that the evolution of life was an unplanned process of chance and necessity (as Neo-Darwinism asserts[*]), then that fact...certainly makes less plausible the idea of a God who intentionally directs the development of life....”
Wait, Dr. West, I thought this was about science education and not religion.
West then goes on to say that the “concern over religious motives is so obviously hypocritical” because one leading opponent to the bill was Barbara Forrest who is “a militant atheist” who was “seeking grassroots support to lobby against the bill on the official website of Oxford atheist Richard Dawkins.” This he defines as “anti-religious bigotry.” First of all, for West to call a citizen “bigoted” on the sole grounds that she is an atheist and that she rallied fellow citizens to oppose proposed legislation is not only patently offensive, and not only reduces the word “bigotry” to meaningless, but is typical of the thoughtless and unscholarly arguments in which the Discovery Institute’s fellows so frequently engage.
Second, although West goes on to argue that it is hypocritical to simultaneously “denounc[e] the supposed religious motivation of supporters of the bill” and rally opposition on the website of an atheist. In other words, West sees religious motivation and secular motivation as basically equivalent and sees some form of unfairness in attacking the one and following the other. But note two things: (1) this argument assumes what West just denied—that the bill was advanced for a religious motive (after all, if it was not religiously motivated, there would be no alleged hypocrisy for West to attack); and (2) this argument ignores the fact that the Establishment Clause is not neutral between laws that promote religion and laws that promote secular purposes.
All sorts of laws advance secular purposes—that’s what laws are supposed to do, and the Constitution assumes as much—but no law may advance a merely religious purpose under the Constitution. Thus those who lobby for law to advance a religious purpose are indeed under a disadvantage, one traceable to the Constitution itself, which purposely erects a roadblock in the path of those who would want to use the government to propagate a religion. It does not erect a similar roadblock to those who would use the government for secular purposes[**], whether it be to set up a fire department, or run the U.S. Army, or the Post Office, or whether it be to teach students about biological science. It is therefore perfectly valid for a secularist to attack the religious motivations of her political opponents, while simultaneously rallying her own political supporters to secularism.
This effort to equate religion and secularism for purposes of the First Amendment is typical of the modern ID Creationism movement, as I documented in my recent Chapman Law Review article. But the equivalency is not only false as a matter of epistemology, it is also invalid for purposes of the Constitution, which does treat laws differently if they are advanced from a religious motive than if they are advanced from a secular motive.
*—Of course, West is phrasing this carefully to appeal to the misrepresentation of evolution common among its religious opponents, who claim evolution is about “randomness.” It is not. It is about the long-term, accumulated, non-random selection among random variables.
**—The only exception being, of course, laws that try to ban the free exercise of religion. Teaching evolution in a classroom is obviously not a law that tries to ban the free exercise of religion.
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