John West over at Disco’s propaganda clearing-house is gloating about how the ACLU of Louisiana has admitted that the LSEA, that state’s version of the DI’s bullshit “academic freedom” legislation, has admitted that the bill itself would probably pass constitutional muster as written. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve always suspected this to be the case: the law seems to be sufficiently vague in it’s language to avoid any establishment clause challenge. West, of course, continues beating away at the fig-leaf section:
[T]he LSEA explicitly states that it “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or promote discrimination against religion or non-religion.” Incredibly, Ms. Esman suggests that this wording doesn’t mean what it says, insisting that “It does not say it prohibits the introduction of religion, and there’s a difference.” Actually, the language is even broader than that, prohibiting anything that might be used to promote a religious doctrine or religious discrimination.
The Discoverup Institute has been devoted, since their inception, to hiding the clear religious nature of their particular brand of creationism in order to get it past the courts. The reason they are behind these laws is because they want to inject their misinformation about evolutionary biology into the science classes to create FUD. They’re various attempts at crafting a successful application of the Wedge Strategy have been met with abject failure, but it now appears that they’ve developed a strategy where the law enabling creationism is vague enough to get by a court challenge, even if an individual application of said law could succumb to such. The probable goal behind these laws is to keep the target moving, the laws can stay in place while science education activists have to constantly put out fires in the places they’re enacted.
We’ll see what happens.
June 27, 2008 at 9:04 am
What the Louisiana bill does is set what I’ve called a “Dover Trap” for every local school district in the state. Emboldened by the law, local districts will overtly inject creationist crap into their local science curricula, and sooner or later some irate parent is going to bring suit. That will almost certainly cost that local district like it cost Dover, where the district paid $1 million in legal costs. That the sate legislature passed a vague and misleading law will be no defense in federal court.
The state legislators don’t give a damn — they won’t get sued. The same was the case in Ohio before the State BOE came to its senses. Father Michael Cochran, a member of the State BOE, said, “So sue us!” But it wasn’t the state board that was at risk. It’s the local districts.
June 27, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Another scenario that comes to mind is that the DI may just be doing some very elaborate venue shopping. Keep the ID policies coming to various school districts until they find a court that will let it fly. No matter how many school districts end up with Dover bills, the DI’s goal is to find a back door, and they’ll step over locale after locale to accomplish such.