[Mb-civic] 1st Suit in State to Attack 'Intelligent Design' Filed By Henry Weinstein The Los Angeles Times

[Michael Butler]

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    1st Suit in State to Attack 'Intelligent Design' Filed
    By Henry Weinstein
    The Los Angeles Times

    Wednesday 11 January 2006

    A group of parents in the small Tehachapi mountain community of Lebec on
Tuesday filed the first lawsuit challenging the teaching of "intelligent
design" in a California public school.

    The suit targets what appears to be the latest wrinkle in the continuing
national fight between supporters and opponents of teaching evolution in
public schools - a course that says it examines the debate as an issue of
"philosophy."

    Supporters of intelligent design lost a court fight in Pennsylvania last
month that both sides had seen as a test case. US District Judge John E.
Jones III rejected the Dover, Pa., school board's decision to teach
intelligent design as part of a science course, ruling that design was "an
interesting theological argument, but ... not science."

    In this case, the parents say in their suit that school officials in
Lebec - a town of about 1,300 just west of Interstate 5 in Kern County and
about 63 miles north of Los Angeles - designed their course as a way of
getting around that decision.

    At a special meeting of the El Tejon Unified School District on Jan. 1,
at which the board approved the new course, "Philosophy of Design," school
Supt. John W. Wight said that he had consulted the school district's
attorneys and that they "had told him that as long as the course was called
'philosophy,' " it could pass legal muster, according to the lawsuit.

    The board approved the course 3 to 2.

    A woman who identified herself as a secretary at the school district
said Tuesday that Wight was out of town and unavailable for comment and that
no one else was authorized to comment on the suit.

    In a Jan. 6 letter to lawyers who challenged the class, Wight wrote that
"our legal advisors have pointed out they are unaware of any court or
California statute which has forbidden public schools to explore cultural
phenomena, including history, religion or creation myths."

    He added that he would "promptly intervene if anyone should stray into
teaching or advocating the tenets of any religion or creed, including
intelligent design."

    But the plaintiffs argue that the school district has no intention of
setting up an open debate on comparative religion or competing philosophies.

    An initial course description, which was distributed to students and
their families last month, said "the class will take a close look at
evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological and
biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid. The
class will discuss intelligent design as an alternative response to
evolution. Physical and chemical evidence will be presented suggesting the
earth is thousands of years old, not billions."

    The course, which began Jan. 3 and is scheduled to run for one month, is
being taught by Sharon Lemburg, a special education teacher with a bachelor
of arts in physical education and social science, according to the lawsuit.

    The suit adds that Lemburg "has no training or certification in the
teaching of science, religion or philosophy," and is "the wife of the
minister for the local Assembly of God Church, a Christian fundamentalist
church, and a proponent of a creationist world view."

    The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for
Separation of Church and State, which is representing the plaintiffs, said
the course is "the wave of the future throughout the United States," for
backers of intelligent design.

    "It is my understanding that this school district has been approached by
other school districts to clone this course and use it elsewhere. That is
why this is of national significance. We would like to build a retaining
wall against that wave in this case," he said.

    The course description shows that the class "is not philosophy or
comparative religion," Lynn said, but, instead, "is a teacher trying to
trump science with religion."

    Casey Luskin, the legal affairs director of the Discovery Institute, an
organization that supports intelligent design said he had not read the
lawsuit but that if Americans United is trying to keep students from hearing
about alternatives to evolutionary theory that would be "censorship."

    On the other hand, Luskin said, if the school district is trying to
teach "young-earth creationism or biblical creationism as fact, that will
get them into legal trouble. I would like to see the full course syllabus
before making a definitive judgment."

    Intelligent design holds that some biological systems are so complex
they could not have evolved through random mutations as the vast majority of
biologists teach. They argue that complexity is proof that life was formed
by an intelligent designer.

    Advocates of the theory generally do not identify who they think the
designer was. Judge Jones, an appointee of President Bush, said the
extensive testimony in the Pennsylvania case made it clear that "no serious
alternative to God as the designer has been proposed" by members of the
intelligent design movement.

    The 11 plaintiffs in the current case - parents whose children attend
Frazier Mountain High School in Lebec - said in their suit that the course
"was designed to advance religious theories on the origins of life,
including creationism and its offshoot 'intelligent design.' "

    Because of that, the course violates provisions of the US and California
constitutions barring establishment of religion, they say.

    With one exception, the suit asserts, "the course relies exclusively on
videos that advocate religious perspectives and present religious theories
as scientific ones - and because the teacher has no scientific training,
students are not provided with any critical analysis of the presentation."

    The parents are asking a US District Court judge in Fresno to issue a
temporary restraining order barring the course.

    One of the parents, Kenneth Hurst, who has a doctorate in geology and is
a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, said
in court papers that the class "conflicts with my beliefs as a scientist. I
believe this class undermines the sound scientific principles taught in
Frazier Mountain High School's biology curriculum and is structured in a way
that deprives my children of the opportunity to be presented with an
objective education that would aid the development of their critical
thinking skills."

    Hurst, who has children in 10th and 12th grades, said the class also
interfered with his personal religious views as a Quaker and "reflects a
preference for fundamentalist Christianity over all other religious and
scientific viewpoints."