UCMP GOING TO COURT

What a travesty, and (one hopes) one that will be recognized as an empty, baseless claim, as I've written about before, here and here.

At issue: whether or not the UCMP 'Understanding Evolution' site can mention that some people, some religions, don't have a huge bone to pick with evolution. This is what the legal eagles are slavering about.

As I said over at PZ Mwahaha's, there's potentially more at stake here than academic freedom in the universities. If the court rules that the UCMP site is protected because of academic freedom, but does not spell out that the complaint has no merit in and of itself, then people like Larry Caldwell will continue to argue that public school teachers like myself are violating the Establishment Clause.

Why will the carnival of suits behind this action attempt to go after teachers like me? Because teachers like me:

1) direct students to the UCMP site or to NCSE, and encourage students to use these sites as resources in writing essays;

2) show the PBS documentary series 'Evolution' to their class;

3) point out that (gasp!) the author of their textbook is an observant Catholic, or that John Paul II remarked that evolution is more than a hypothesis

Remember, this bunch of clowns are fellow travelers of those folk who declined to interview Ken Miller for their film 'Expelled' because they felt it would CONFUSE people. They are happy with a state of affairs in which science is portrayed as religion's implacable foe, delighted in fact, and some of them are willing to go to court to make sure that fiction is preserved at all costs.