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Intelligent design efforts likely to fail

By E. RAY MOORE JR.

The current Supreme Court interpretation of the separation of church and state has allowed the public schools to ignore the long-held belief by most Americans that God is the Creator.

Now the same separation views are used to limit the access of intelligent design views to our public school children.

Many Christian families over the next few years will vacate the government schools due to such intransigence and hostility toward Christianity and toward traditional beliefs as advocated in the column in The State on Aug. 8, “The Intelligent Design End Run,” by Sheryl McCarthy.

Justice Hugo Black, a one-time member of the Ku Klux Klan, authored the Supreme Court’s Everson opinion in 1947, which first used separation of church and state in Supreme Court jurisprudence, a phrase not in the text of the Constitution. This phrase was lifted from Thomas Jefferson’s letter of 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association to answer their concerns that the federal government would sponsor a single Christian denomination.

There have been more than a dozen cases since 1947’s Everson case based partially on Hugo Black’s reasoning. This case has proven to be one of the most socially, academically and constitutionally destructive cases in U.S. history. To use Ms. McCarthy’s terminology, it was Justice Hugo Black who used this then-novel interpretation of the separation of church and state to make an “end run” around the Constitution.

This view has been used to make Christians’ beliefs such as creationism or intelligent design second-class or unworthy ideas in public education. It was also used to exclude prayer and Bible reading in 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court cases.

Yes, all Christians believe that the government and church must be administratively distinct, but neither the U.S. Constitution nor the founders intended to set up a secular state that did not acknowledge God. The Judeo-Christian cast of our laws and founding is incontrovertible.

Many Christians view evolutionism not as science, but as religion or dogma, and also the foundation for such destructive social and political ideologies as racism, fascism and Marxism. Christianity and creationism teach that all men are created equal and in the image of God; all mankind has a common ancestor and origin, thus rendering evolutionism as foundational to racism.

Readers should examine social Darwinism’s views to confirm this. These views have been used to demean ethnic minorities for centuries by dogmatic social Darwinians. Evangelical Christians, traditional Catholics and orthodox Jews accept evolutionism as neither a valid science nor as a beneficent social policy.

The evolutionary dogmatists are unlikely to bend since they have the power, the media, and Supreme Court decisions since the Everson case to assure their continued control of public education. Orthodox Christians are wasting time asking for equal time for intelligent design in the public schools. George Bush cannot help on this.

Over the next decade, millions of children, with the assistance of their churches, will relocate to a whole new Christian and home-school system, where both evolution and creationism will be taught fairly and objectively.

Mr. Moore is director of Exodusmandate.org, a ministry to assist home-schooling and Christian schools. He lives in Blythewood.

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