This Masquerade

Ring them bells--rationality won the day (at least for today) as the judge in the Pennsylvania intelligent design court case ruled against the Dover school board (whose members were all replaced in the most recent election) for promoting intelligent design in biology classes. First, from the AP (via MSNBC)

"Intelligent design" is "a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory" and cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said.

And more from the WaPo:

In his ruling today, Jones said several members of the Dover Area School Board repeatedly lied during the trial to cover their motives for promoting intelligent design even as they professed religious beliefs, the Associated Press reported.

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID [Intelligent Design] Policy," Jones wrote.

Jones said advocates of intelligent design "have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors," adding that he did not believe the concept should not be studied and discussed, AP reported. But he concluded that "it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom."

Specifically, Jones said the school board's policy on intelligent design violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In defending the board's policy, witnesses in a six-week trial last fall argued that intelligent design is a scientific theory and stressed that including it in the curriculum advanced secular goals of opening students' minds to another possible explanation for the origin of life.

But Jones wrote in his 139-page opinion that "the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom."