Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case brief

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case brief summary
400 F. Supp. 2d 707

CASE SYNOPSIS:
Plaintiff parents sued defendants, a school district and its board (Board), challenging the constitutional validity of a Board policy that required presentation of the concept of intelligent design (ID) in ninth grade biology classes, claiming that it constituted an establishment of religion prohibited by the First Amendment, made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the Pa. Const. art. I, § 3 (2005).

OVERVIEW: Proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests made it very clear that the Board's ID policy violated the Establishment Clause.
The religious nature of ID would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child. ID was not science because (1) it violated centuries-old science ground rules by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the irreducible complexity argument central to ID employed the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution had been refuted by the scientific community. Additionally, ID had not gained the scientific community's acceptance, generated peer-reviewed publications, or been the subject of testing and research. Moreover, ID could not uncouple itself from its religious antecedents. While the theory of evolution was imperfect, that it could not yet render an explanation on every point could not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative religious hypothesis into science classrooms or misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. It was unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

OUTCOME: The court issued a declaratory judgment in favor of the parents that the Board's ID Policy violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and the Pennsylvania. Constitution. The Board was permanently enjoined from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the school district.

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