A United States federal judge has ordered a Georgian school district to remove stickers from its science textbooks that declared that ”evolution is a theory, not a fact” which should be ”approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered”.
Judge Clarence Cooper of the Federal District Court ruled that the stickers were contrary to the First Amendment’s promise to separate church and state because the stickers ”convey a message of endorsement of religion”.
It also went against the state of Georgia Constitution, which prohibits the use of public money to aid religion.
Jeffrey Selman, one of five parents who with the American Civil Liberties Union brought the suit against the school board, told The New York Times that he was ”ecstatic … Science is religion-free, and it has to stay that way.”
He added that the ruling will be a warning to fundamentalists across the US who have campaigned for creationist views of the world to be included on the curriculum.
The sticker system had been used since 2002 after parents complained about the Darwinian contents of the textbooks. Campaigners first opposed the books, then called for supplementary material to be given to teach creationist views of how the world was created. Finally they settled for the stickers.
Marjorie Rogers, a parent in Cobb county who was heavily involved in that campaign, told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme on Friday: ”My concern in this case was not of a religious nature. My concern in this case was that the textbooks did not contain accurate science.”
She went on: ”Admittedly the majority of scientists follow that [Darwinian] view but there is a growing minority of scientists who question a lot of the evidence and I would hope that the theory of evolution would not beheld as some sort of unassailable standard.”
Biology teachers in Dover, Pennsylvania, this week took their school board to court after local officials instructed them to read a statement in class questioning the theory of evolution.
They had been ordered by the town’s elected school board to preface their usual class on evolution with a statement, saying ”Darwin’s theory is a theory … not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.”
There the debate focused on whether the schools could teach an updated version of creationism, ”intelligent design”, which argues that the world and its organisms are too complex to have evolved according to Darwin’s theory of evolution. — Guardian Unlimited Â