The article reported that voters in Dover, Pennsylvania, ousted all eight school board members who had backed teaching “intelligent design” in public schools along with evolution and replaced them November 8 with a slate of candidates supporting Darwin’s scientific theory.

“You just voted God out of your city,” fumed evangelist Pat Robertson November 10 on his television show “The 700 Club,” referring to the citizens of Dover. His remark reflected the frustration of rightist forces pushing “intelligent design”—a repackaged version of creationism and a thinly veiled attempt to impose the teaching of religion in school.

Four days before the November 8 vote, a six-week trial came to a close in a lawsuit filed in federal court against the Dover school board’s October 2004 decision to mandate the teaching of “intelligent design.” The judge is expected to issue his decision by early January. The suit, brought by 11 parents in the area, asked the court to strike down the board’s ruling as a violation of the separation of church and state codified in the U.S. Constitution. The board had voted last year to require students in ninth grade biology classes to be told that evolution “is not a fact,” and that “intelligent design” is an alternative they should study, including by going to the school library and reading Of Pandas and People, an anti-evolutionary tract published by proponents of the cryptoreligious credo.

Proponents of the anti-scientific dogma are waging a battle against evolution in 20 states, including Kansas.

On November 8, the Kansas Board of Education voted by a 6 to 4 margin that students in that state should be taught there are doubts about evolution’s scientific standing. The new standards, which take effect in 2008, advise teachers to explain that aspects of Darwin’s evolutionary theory are controversial and lack “adequate natural explanations for the genetic code.”  
 
 
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