Update on the Mount Soledad cross saga

When we last discussed this story, on December 12, 2013 a US District Court judge had ordered the removal of the huge cross on the top of Mount Soledad, staying his order for 90 days until any appeals are filed and heard. The Ninth Circle Court of Appeals had ruled that the cross standing on federally owned land was a violation of the Establishment Clause and the situation needed to be remedied in some way and while the District Court judge said he disagreed with the ruling, given the constraints the Appeals Court had imposed, he saw no option other than its removal. [Read more…]

Prayer at government functions-4: The role of history and tradition

Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education laying out the neutrality requirement that governments needed to comply with when it came to religion (that I summarized in part 3) basically said that the government had to be strictly neutral between religious sects and also between religion and non-religion. That latter requirement has been particularly difficult to implement without requiring the government to not have anything to do with religion at all and over time we have seen a steady weakening of the resolve to implement it. [Read more…]

Prayer at government functions-3: The tricky issue of neutrality

In ruling that the prayer practices of the town of Greece were unconstitutional, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals basically said that the US Supreme Court, in its 1983 precedent-setting case Marsh v. Chambers, had used the wrong reasoning by rejecting the so-called Lemon Test and other tests for Establishment Clause violations and using instead an argument based on history and tradition. It is quite unusual for a lower court to challenge a Supreme Court precedent and the Appeals Court had to do some dancing around to justify this. [Read more…]

Prayer at government functions-2: The nature of the Greece prayers

Like many observers, I was puzzled by the decision of the US Supreme Court to accept the case in which in 2008 two citizens of the town of Greece in upstate New York (Susan Galloway who is Jewish and Linda Stephens who is an atheist) sued the town council for beginning its monthly meetings with a prayer. As I said in the first post in this series, there was nothing in this case that seemed to exceed the boundaries established by the precedent 1983 case of Marsh v. Chambers and since those prayers were ruled constitutional, then one would have expected these to be too. The District Court ruled in 2010 in just such a manner but in May 2012 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals surprised everyone by unanimously overruling the District Court verdict, and the US Supreme Court took up the case, hearing oral arguments in November 2013. [Read more…]

Oklahoma is OK with same-sex marriage, for now

US District Court judge Terence C. Kern ruled yesterday that Oklahoma’s constitutional amendment passed in 2004 limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Judge Kern relied heavily on this year’s US Supreme Court ruling in the DOMA case United States v. Windsor to strike down the Oklahoma law. [Read more…]

Prayer at government functions-1: The puzzle of the Greece v Galloway case

The Greece v Galloway case dealing with whether what kind of prayer, or any kind of prayer at all, is allowable at official government functions, such as at the beginning of the sessions of legislatures and other governmental bodies, brings to the fore the thorny problem of how to interpret the Establishment Clause of the US constitution in this particular context. I have been asked to be on a panel at the Law School of my university later this month that will deal with this case (and at which one of the plaintiffs challenging the practice will also appear) and so I decided that it might be helpful to write up the issues that the Supreme Court will be grappling with before it issues its opinion later this spring. [Read more…]

Pledge of Allegiance challenged again

The issue of whether the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance made it unconstitutional to say at state-sponsored events seemed to have been settled in 2010 when several US Courts of Appeals ruled that since no federal law required people to recite the pledge, no violation of the US constitution occurred. Since there was no divergence in the various appeals court rulings, it was unlikely to be heard by the US Supreme Court and the issue seemed no longer contestable. [Read more…]

Your metadata and the law

Timothy B. Lee explains that your telephone metadata (i.e., all the information about your call other than the actual content of the conversations) can tell the government a lot more than whom you called, when, and for how long. Lee quotes from numerous examples given by Ed Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton University who contributed to a brief for the ACLU, about what your metadata can reveal about you. [Read more…]

From Scopes to Dover-30: Looking at the big picture

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In this final post in this series (Yes, there really is an end!), I want to look at the big picture, to see both how the struggle to oppose the teaching of evolution evolved as a result of legal decisions centered around the establishment clause, and why religious believers have pursued with such vigor this dead-end policy to discredit evolution.

Religious people have always been uncomfortable with the theory of evolution. The extent of this discomfort varies. At one end of this religious spectrum we have those Biblical literalists who want to believe that every single extant species was created specially by god. For these people, the theory of evolution is anathema. Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum are those who willing to accept an interconnected and evolving tree of life, provided that humans are not part of the tree and were somehow miraculously created separately. Such people allow the theory in some areas but arbitrarily exclude it from any part of the origins of humans. At the other end of the religious spectrum are those who accept that humans are also part of the evolutionary tree and have common ancestors with other species but want to reserve some special property for humans (the ‘soul’ for want of a better word) that was created by god using some mysterious means beyond our ken. Such people want to believe that each human being has something special, unique, mystical whose creation and existence cannot be accounted for by the mechanisms of natural selection.
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From Scopes to Dover-29: What next for evolution and religion in schools?

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

As a result of the long string of judicial rulings and Supreme Court precedents that have been outlined in this series that seem to have eliminated almost all their options, what can religious people do now about the teaching of evolution?

In 2007, IDC advocate Michael Behe published yet another book The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits to Darwinism (which I have written about earlier) that tries to add a wrinkle to IDC ideas by arguing that the mutations that drive natural selection are not random but are somehow guided by their peripatetic and secretive designer to achieve a desired organism.

This is a pathetically feeble attempt that will not get anywhere legally. All the reasons given in the Dover verdict for why IDC is a religion and not science apply with equal force to this idea too. Furthermore, it is not even an original idea, having been proposed in the late 19th century by eminent scientists, also for manifestly religious reasons, a fact that is not going to help the case legally.
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