June 21, 2005
Dissent in Dover
Via Panda's Thumb (stories here and here), and as reported by the York Daily Record, the Dover School District's attack on evolution, as funded by the Thomas More Law Center, has exposed an interesting rift between Intelligent Design 'secularists' and the dominionist Thomas More Law Center, when ID heavyweights Dembski, Campbell, and Meyer being withdrawn as expert witnesses on the defendant School District's behalf.
This is interesting for a few reasons - first, the rift already existed - the Discovery Institute has stated in the past that the time isn't ripe to bring suits forward to establish ID in the public schools, ostensibly because ID has not entirely gelled as a theory, but mostly because the Supreme Court some gelling to do of its own.
So why then were three Discovery Institute fellows thisclose to testifying in the doomed Dover effort in the first place? I'll guess that the DI is at a conflicted road - they may have realized that ID, from a public relations vantage, has a finite degree of public debatability. The Dover case has gotten a ton of press already, and how many Dovers will their possibly be after this? Sensing that Dover was going badly, they reached out to Thomas More in an effort to try and right the ship. But the Thomas More lawyers are even loonier than the DI, and the factions didn't mix well.
The presence of 'some other reason' is backed by the conflicting stories given by the DI participants and Thomas More as to the experts discontinued involvement. The fact that they couldn't get their stories straight (the stories mostly inovlving the experts wanting to utilize their own lawyers during testimony), we can better assume that the true reason for the parting was ideological - DI showed up to fix what Thomas More thought was working just fine.
Of course, it's not working fine at all. Cobb County was a far closer case than Dover is turning into - the Dover school district's proposal is far more overtly violative than was Cobb County's, and Thomas More lends a religious taint that Cobb County at least wisely sought to avoid (but was eventually burned on anyway). Not that any of this necessarily matters - the district court judge could see things entirely differently (and is not bound to any of the law made in Cobb County).
posted by scott pilutik at June 21, 2005 01:01 AM
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