Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005)[1] was the first case brought in the United States federal courts testing a public school policy requiring the teaching of intelligent design (ID). The court found intelligent design to be not science.[2][3] In October 2004, the Dover Area School District of York County, Pennsylvania, changed its biology teaching curriculum to require that intelligent design be presented as an alternative to evolution theory, and that Of Pandas and People, a textbook advocating intelligent design, was to be used as a reference book.[4] The prominence of this textbook during the trial was such that the case is sometimes referred to as the Dover Panda Trial,[5][6] a name which recalls the popular name of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, 80 years earlier. The plaintiffs successfully argued that intelligent design is a form of creationism, and that the school board policy violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.The judge applied the Lemon Test, in which a school book could be banned if the authors could be shown to have religion motivations.
What is not so well known is that the US Supreme Court has since repudiated the Lemon Test.
I am not sure which was more absurd, the 1925 or 2005 trial. The 2005 judge was deciding the scientific merit of a textbook based finding some unpublished manuscripts of the authors indicating that they had some religious motivations, and removed religious references in order to comply with requirements of secular schools. The judge said that under the Lemon Test, the book could not be used in a public school. I think it was just put in the library, and the science teachers did not even use it.
The judge's opinion had been ghost-written by the ACLU.
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