If Fundamentalist Protestant Christian religious zealots Alan Bonsell and Bill Buckingham had sought to introduce the teaching of Intelligent Design in the biology classrooms of New York City's Stuyvesant High School, then theirs would have been an utterly spectacular failure, recognized by many as a blatantly brazen attempt in injecting religion into science classrooms. Why? Though in recent years Stuyvesant High School may be better known as the high school where best-selling memoirist Frank McCourt taught English and creative writing for nearly two decades, the school itself has a nearly century-old reputation as America's foremost high school devoted to the sciences, mathematics and engineering; the prestigious alma mater of such distinguished alumni as the late Joshua Lederberg - one of the school's four Nobel Prize laureate alumni - former president of Rockefeller University and a leading pioneer of molecular biology, mathematician and University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer, political pundit Dick Morris, molecular biologist Eric Lander, leader of one of the two teams which sequenced successfully the human genome, and physicists Brian Greene and Lisa Randall. Neither its principal (who has vowed in public that Intelligent Design will never be taught there as long as he serves), nor its faculty, nor its parents would have permitted it. Furthermore, had sixty copies of Intelligent Design "textbook" "Of Pandas and People" appeared suddenly in the school's library, I am certain that some enterprising students might have used them in a "scientific experiment" testing their buoyancy in the briny waters of the Hudson River (For an insightful look at Stuyvesant High School itself, I strongly encourage readers to buy my friend Alec Klein's "A Class Apart", which is available for purchase here at Amazon.com. In the interest of full disclosure, both Klein and I are fellow alumni of Stuyvesant High School and Brown University.).
Located in the southeastern corner of the state of Pennsylvania, the small rural town of Dover is not New York City; its high school, Dover High School, probably doesn't come close to matching Stuyvesant's celebrated academic excellence. Nor does the town of Dover resemble, even remotely, New York City's cosmopolitan religious and ethnic diversity. Instead, Dover is located in Pennsylvanian Dutch country, and, like much of the United States, part of a Fundamentalist Protestant Christian "Bible Belt" in which most of its citizens are devout Christians who strongly believe in the Bible's literal truth, and they regard, with ample suspicion and hostility, an "atheistic" idea like Darwin's Theory of Evolution via Natural Selection. In such an environment, it isn't surprising that former Dover Area School District board members Bonsell and Buckingham succeeded in persuading the board to adopt a policy sympathetic to the teaching of Intelligent Design. However, it is surprising that they did so contrary to the wishes of Dover High School's science faculty, who clearly understood that theirs was a deceitful effort towards introducing a religious doctrine (Intelligent Design) into the high school's 9th grade biology classrooms. Indeed, much later, at the conclusion of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial, Judge John E. Jones III would harshly condemn the Dover Area School District board for ignoring the sound advice of these teachers and acting against their wishes.
Among the many reporters covering the six week-long Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial in the Fall of 2005, the finest included several local reporters, such as York Daily Record's education reporter Lauri Lebo, whose "beat" covered the First Amendment issues raised by the Dover Area School Board's advocacy of Intelligent Design. Now, in "The Devil in Dover", Lauri Lebo has written a terse, but quite compelling, personal account of the trial, told from the perspective of someone who knew many of those involved in the unfolding legal drama (For example, she mentions Bill Buckingham in the acknowledgements section of her book, still counting him as a friend simply because of their mutual admiration for bluegrass music and his excellence as a raconteur.). It is an intensely personal account, since Lebo had to wrestle with personal demons, both during and after the trial, hoping to reconcile herself to her father, a "Born Again" Fundamentalist Protestant Christian, and the owner of the local radio station devoted exclusively to "Christian" programming. It is also a splendidly written account, replete with a simple, almost poetic, prose style, that could remind readers of Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" in its sincerity. It is also the most riveting account I have read yet of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District trial, and one which deserves to take its place alongside Edward Humes' "Monkey Girl" and Matthew Chapman's "40 Days and 40 Nights" as the finest books published so far on the trial itself.
Lebo quickly introduces us to those on the Dover Area School District board like Bonsell and Buckingham, who were passionately advocating Intelligent Design, without making a serious effort in trying to understand it and in determining whether it was truly a "viable" scientific alternative to contemporary evolutionary theory. Indeed, I am delighted that Lebo also provides a remarkably complete summary of the origins of the Intelligent Design movement, mentioning briefly the now infamous "Wedge Document", whose crypto-Fascist objectives included the successful introduction of Intelligent Design "theory" into science classrooms throughout the United States; her coverage only lacks the ample detail and insightful analysis of the movement that is found in Edward Humes' "Monkey Girl". She suggests that the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks evoked a strong spiritual reawakening among many Americans, especially those in Dover, creating a political and cultural atmosphere which led inexorably to a school board quite sympathetic to the teaching of Intelligent Design in Dover High School's science classrooms, even if its members were only vaguely familiar with its principal tenets like the concept of "Irreducible Complexity". Hers is an appealing, quite compelling, argument, but one I am quite skeptical of, for several reasons, the least of which is recognizing that Intelligent Design creationism and other kinds of creationism had enjoyed ample support among Fundamentalist Protestant Christians long before the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks. I had known people like Alan Bonsell and Bill Buckingham many years before, as a Brown University undergraduate, within its Campus Crusade for Christ campus chapter membership; many of its leaders were friends, with whom I had much in common politically, while ignoring our radically divergent interests in science and religion. Indeed, I became the "token" "Darwinist" on an "Ad Hoc Committee on Origins" which sponsored a "Creation Science vs. Evolution" debate held at Brown's hockey rink, between Henry Morris, the president of the San Diego-based Institute for Creation Research, and Ken Miller, a young assistant professor of biology, who had recently returned to his undergraduate alma mater (The debate resembled a religious revival meeting of the kind described so vividly by Lebo, since most of those present were from Fundamentalist Protestant Christian churches in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts.).
It is clear from Lebo's compelling saga that the Dover Area School District board, led by the likes of Bonsell and Buckingham, was "boldly going" where no other school board had gone before, in its blatant effort at injecting Christianity into Dover High School science classrooms during the summer and fall of 2004. A board that was ignoring not only the educational guidance provided by veteran teacher Berta Spahr and her Dover High School science colleagues, but also defying the wishes of its own attorneys, who recognized the potentially perilous course that the board was undertaking towards a potential First Amendment lawsuit against itself. Not only a potential First Amendment lawsuit, but also potential charges of perjury loomed, after several board members, including Bonsell and Buckingham, denied under oath that "creationism" was discussed at several acrimonious board meetings, which were covered by two of Lebo's York Daily Record colleagues and another journalist from a local television station. They also refused to admit, again under oath, how sixty copies of the Intelligent Design textbook "Of Pandas and People" were purchased from money raised via a "private" church donation. Lebo deftly switches back and forth between the board's shenanigans to the potential interest shown in its activities from the National Center for Science Education, the Discovery Institute, and the Thomas More Law Center, whose attorneys would serve as the board's principal defense attorneys during the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial.
Without question, the most riveting portions of "The Devil in Dover" are Lebo's extensive recollections of the trial testimony itself. Reading her version of events during Ken Miller's cross examination by defense attorney Patrick Gillen and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe's bizarre exchanges with lead plaintiff attorney Eric Rothschild over the very definition of science and the evolutionary implications of immunology, one is left indelibly with a strong impression of how important these testimonies were in Judge Jones' well-reasoned, and well-stated, decision; a decision that was not replete with instances of "plagiarism" and "judicial activism" - as many Intelligent Design creationists and other creationists have contended frequently here at Amazon.
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