1 MR. ROTHSCHILD: Good morning, Your Honor.
2 My co-counsel and I represent eleven parents who are
3 challenging the Dover Area School District's change to
4 its biology curriculum. That change to the biology
5 curriculum, which is displayed on your monitor and on
6 the screen, singles out the scientific theory of
7 evolution, among all the scientific concepts taught to
8 Dover High School students, as being suspect and
9 promotes the religious proposition of intelligent
10 design as a competing scientific theory.
11 Eighteen years ago, the United States
12 Supreme Court, in Edwards versus Aguillard, held that
13 public schools could not teach students creation
14 science because that proposition's core concept of a
15 supernatural creator is religious, not scientific, and
16 therefore violates the establishment clause of the
17 First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
18 The Court recognized that the teaching of creation
19 science was motivated by a religious and cultural
20 agenda, not the improvement of scientific education.
21 What we will prove at this trial is that the
22 Dover board policy has the same characteristics and
23 the same constitutional defects as the creation
24 science policy struck down in Edwards. You will hear
25 testimony from members of the Dover community, these
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1 parents, teachers, administrators, and board members,
2 about how this change to the curriculum came to be.
3 Board members announced their interest in
4 the topic of evolution in starkly religious terms.
5 They looked for a book that could provide a religious
6 alternative to evolution, and they found one in Of
7 Pandas and People.
8 They changed the science curriculum to
9 advance a specific religious viewpoint, and in doing
10 so, they ignored accepted scientific knowledge, failed
11 to avail themselves of the advice of established
12 scientific organizations, and ignored their own
13 science teachers who opposed the change to the science
14 curriculum.
15 They did everything you would do if you
16 wanted to incorporate a religious topic in science
17 class and cared nothing about its scientific validity.
18 And we will show that the members of the school board
19 that passed this policy expressed their desire to
20 teach creationism over and over and over again.
21 That's their word, "creationism."