Laurie Goodstein had a great piece in yesterday’s Times about the “intelligent design” trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, and how the Thomas More Law Center scoured the country for years looking for a school board willing to provoke a lawsuit over this pseudo-science. So the trial itself was intelligently designed, by reactionary political operators. (The law center is chaired, bizarrely enough, by former baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn.) Goodstein reports:
In earlier cases, the center defended an enormous cross placed on a hill outside San Diego and Nativity scenes in Florida and New York. It sued the Ann Arbor schools for providing benefits for same-sex partners. And in one of its most controversial cases, it defended an anti-abortion group that ran an online list of doctors it said should be stopped from providing abortions.
It should be noted that the Discovery Institute, the main “scientific” body promoting intelligent design, is somewhat embarrassed by the Thomas More Law Center and its handling of the Dover case.
What’s amazing is how these reactionary political groups stage controversies and then try to portray them as genuine groundswells of Christian populist sentiment.
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