] I, for one, think the stickers are silly, but mostly harmless.
] It is a theory. It's a really fucking good one and
] probably true, but I don't think it harms all that much.
] Possibly it causes less harm than the expenditure of money to
] defend against the lawsuit. Likewise, I'm not sure I agree
] with the camp that the church and state doctrine is violated
] every time anything secular touches on matters of faith. I
] think the far left can take this fight too far, honestly.

The sticker is not a big deal, if the sticker is applied evenly to all scientific theories. Science has always been about the direction the balance of the evidence exists for, and in this case that'e evolution.

If, however, you have this sticker that says evolution is just a theory and not a fact (which is completely accurate) for evolution, but not for say string theory then it seems to me that one might come to the conclusion that the science supporting string theory is a lot more solid than the science supporting evolution, because of the existance of the sticker. This, I think, is quite harmful. So apply the sticker equally, or don't apply it at all.

I don't think you can call the people concerned with seperation of church and state leftists universally. Non-authoritarians would probably be a better description, as many libertarians who tend to be on the right on most issues are opposed to this sort of stuff. One can even make a very sound argument that the aclu is the best friend the church ever had, in terms of protecting it from the corrupting influences of government.

bmitchell wrote:
] apply the sticker equally, or don't apply it at all.

[ I can agree with that... it throws the absurdity of this whole argument into high relief. Now we're talking about a sticker that says "Everything in this book is probably a theory. A theory is not fact, but a set of statements which are supported by scientific experimentation and empirical evidence." Of course, any science book worth anything will say essentially that same thing in the introduction.

...]

] I don't think you can call the people concerned with
] seperation of church and state leftists universally.

[ I didn't intend to. I merely think that it's the leftie folks that go overboard more of the time. But I may well be wrong about that. Anyway, they're coming out as of now. If I had to guess, there'll be an appeal, and they'll go back in. Millions of dollars will be wasted in litigation, while the district cancels it's music program. -k]

k wrote:
] [ Just caught, accidentally, a segment on the local Fox News
] affiliate the DeKalb county has lost it's legal battle over
] the stickers they placed in science books stating the
] "evolution is only a theory, not a fact". The ruling,
] apparently, hinged on the fact that the stickers represented a
] linking of secular with religious, and thus violates the
] separation of church and state.

Isn't it Cobb County, rather than DeKalb County? I heard the story on NPR this evening and the federal court is in DeKalb County, I believe, but the case involved the school board in Cobb County.

-Dolemite

] Isn't it Cobb County, rather than DeKalb County? I heard the
] story on NPR this evening and the federal court is in DeKalb
] County, I believe, but the case involved the school board in
] Cobb County.

Yes it is, and many memestreams, such as Palindrome, Janelane, and myself are all wonderful products of the public schools of Cobb County.

Even when I was in Middle School in the early to mid 90s, I remember crazy policies trying to silence evolution (though they didn't try that shit in HS).

6th grade science was the first time I ever heard about Evolution, and I remember the teacher perfacing it with "Today I'm going to talk with you about something, but you are not allowed to ask me questions about the material, because I am not allowed to answer them..." And in that lesson she didn't even come close to talking about Man-from-apes. She stuck with the "classic" examples of evolution, like the fossil record of horses evolving a hoof.