Louisiana Coalition for Science

By Barbara Forrest

The National Center for Science Education is the national clearinghouse for assistance with fending off creationist attacks on the teaching of science. NCSE was incorporated in 1983 “to provide a central information and resource clearinghouse, helping to coordinate the efforts of people working at state and local levels to preserve the integrity of science education.” Headquartered in Oakland, California, it provides help at no cost to parents, teachers, school boards, educational administrators, and concerned citizens who need help in protecting public school science education. Continue Reading »

By Barbara Forrest

“Louisiana Open for Business — Creationists Welcome”

That is the message that Louisiana public officials are sending to the rest of the country since the creationist LA Science Education Act (LSEA) was enacted into law in 2008. They are taking their instructions from, among others, the creationist Rev. Gene Mills, the executive director of the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), the Focus on the Family affiliate that engineered passage of the bill in the Louisiana legislature. Rev. Mills, whose own children are homeschooled and attend private Christian schools, actually made his victory announcement using those exact words: “Louisiana is open for business. . . . And academic freedom and inquiry are welcomed here in the state of Louisiana.” Of course, in referring to “academic freedom and inquiry” he was speaking in the well-documented creationist code language in which his friends at the Discovery Institute, an intelligent design creationist think tank, have coached him. Last year —2008— was a good year for creationists in Louisiana. So far in 2009, they are still batting a thousand. Continue Reading »

By Barbara Forrest

Today, December 20, 2008, marks the third anniversary of the landmark decision in the first intelligent design (ID) creationism legal case, Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area School District (2005). Ever since that ruling, the plaintiffs and those of us who served on their legal team in the now-famous “Dover trial” observe the anniversary by wishing each other an affectionate “Merry Kitzmas!” On December 20, 2005, in a Memorandum Opinion that a former Ohio judge described as “judicial poetry,” Judge John E. Jones III ruled that the 2004 ID creationist policy statement adopted by the Dover, PA, school board “violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and . . . the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

As an expert witness for the plaintiffs, I would like to thank Judge Jones for helping to preserve both the integrity of public school science education and the constitutional separation of church and state through his decision. I was honored to serve in his courtroom and in this case. But this year, the anniversary of the plaintiffs’ success in the Kitzmiller case has been turned bittersweet by my state’s refusal to learn the lessons of Dover and of our own history. Despite Louisiana’s passage of a 1981 creationist law and the subsequent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), which outlawed the teaching of creationism, the Louisiana legislature and Gov. Bobby Jindal, by respectively passing and signing the LA Science Education Act (LSEA), ensured that our state will remain tethered to the bottom of every national quality-of-life survey. Continue Reading »