Darwin on Trial, Take Two

"The last time we mixed religion and politics, people got burned at the stake."

~ George Carlin

So, it's that time of year again. In Los Angeles, the birds are changing colour and falling from the trees. In the District of Columbia, the Republicans are sitting down with the planet's economic stability for a game of Russian Roulette. In Ottawa, Stephen Harper is still mulling over the idea of allowing American police to enforce American law on Canadian soil. And in Texas, the state's Board of Education is having a hard look at science textbooks, and asking why there's all this fluff about evolution and other heretical nonsense, but not one word about the absolute truth of how God snapped his fingers and made the world.

And people wonder why I'm a cynic. The theory of evolution, as written in "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin, has been challenged since Day One in every conceivable manner possible. Tennessee v. Scopes in 1925 (better known as the Scopes Monkey Trial) was the first well-known legal showdown between the two sides - and ended with John Thomas Scopes being fined $100 (the equivalent of about $1300 today) for violation of the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in any state-funded school. This stood until cases like Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968 put the first cracks in creation being taught in schools, and ended with Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987.

And things sat, and they simmered, never breaching the surface, but like the One Ring of Sauron, knowing its time would come again. And in 2005, it came back with a vengeance. One little town in Pennsylvania suddenly found itself besieged by its itself, with the eyes of the world watching the Next Big Fight, Kitzmiller v. Dover. In the aftermath of it, a lot of people found their own families to be unwelcome company, a town called a cease-fire to go and lick its wounds, and the argument that religion has a place in science classes was thought to be ended once and for all.

But as the Wise Man says, "...nothing ever really ends, does it?" Because this time, the problem is potentially so much bigger. Due to the number of children in its school system, national publishers write design the textbooks for the Texas market. Which means, other states that want other textbooks will have to scrounge for what's left, make do with what they've got, or place their own orders for completely different textbooks, increasing the cost as a result. And with so much of the country's education system woefully under funded, complicated by three billion dollars in cuts from the sequester, may leave schools with very little in the way of other options.

Looks like the Cracks of Doom didn't work as Frodo had intended.