The above is a funny diagram from the blog of Jessica Hagy. That’s her whole schtick. The entire blog is Venn diagrams and x-y graphs scribbled onto index cards. Some of them are pretty funny.

You ought to read the comments people left on that post. It’s a replay in microcosm of all of the comments people have left on my Duggar articles.

It’s some kind of bizarre coincidence that the first time I encounter her blog the diagram featured that day is of the Duggars! It’s also kind of fitting. It gives me a way to close off that chapter in this blog’s history.

Unlike some of you, I moved beyond the Duggars a long time ago. For me, they were just brief stop on this expedition through Fundieland. They were a strange specimen to tag and release. This blog never was about the Duggars, at least no more than it’s about Shirley and Squirrely. Little did I know that the Duggars would be responsible for about a quarter of my traffic and half of my comments. There have been very few days when they weren’t occupying one of the spots in the Recent Comments list. They give new visitors a distorted view of what this blog is about.

The time has come. The time is now. Jim Bob Duggar, will you please go now!

Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, because he was sick of him. That’s all people identified him with. At one point Conan Doyle even forbade people to mention Holmes’ name in his presence.

I had been planning for a while to shut down the Duggar threads on August 7th. When I saw the above diagram, I thought that would be a great opportunity to shut it down now. I ultimately decided to stick with the original plan. You have one week to say your goodbyes.

The latest Carnival of the Godless is up over at Disillusioned Words. Go check it out.

Unlike past carnivals, I didn’t submit anything of my own. Instead, you’ll find ParrotLover’s “God Did Not Make Klingons”. It’s the best thing to appear on this site in the last two weeks, so read it if you haven’t already.

My favorite article of this carnival is “Let There Be Light” at A Dark and Sinister Force for Good. I had never seen this site before. I knew I was going to love it when I read the About page. The blog’s author, who goes by the nom de plume “Archvillain”, says this about himself:

Among many other unpleasant traits, I am extremely intolerant of stupidity. I have no problem whatsoever heaping scorn upon inexcusably stupid ideas — or even good ideas poorly or stupidly presented.

That’s when I knew I’d found a good blog.

Archvillain writes in “Let There Be Light”:

Pointing out the ignorance and stupidity of the willfully ignorant and stupid is not impolite or cruel, it is a necessity. It is also a survival mechanism for our civilization. Allowing outspoken stupidity to go unchallenged is to be complicit in its ascendancy. I, for one, will not be a party to the destruction of our civilization and society at the hands of the religious barbarians in our midst.

I would also like to draw your attention to “Random Book Review: What Do You Care What Other People Think” over at Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist. He reviews one of Richard Feynman’s autobiographies. Feynman was a huge influence on me (through his first autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman) at a critical age. Even though I never met him, he’s one of the few people who largely shaped who I am today (but please don’t blame him for Bay of Fundie. You can thank my extremist relatives for that!).

I’m trying to get caught up on a couple of things from last week. Here’s one of them. You may have seen this on Pharyngula. As PZ Myers explains:

A couple of college students in Toronto…took offense at the patent absurdity of the “Bible and Bible Studies” section of a large bookstore at Yonge and Eglinton, and decided to help organize the shelves by filing their contents more appropriately. They quietly moved the contents to other places in the bookstore, like Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult.

I actually did something similar on a much smaller scale last year. One of the culprits of the Toronto incident describes the event in more detail at his blog, Phaedron Rising.

What I wanted to bring to your attention, though, was his follow-up article:

Many comments on Pharyngula suggested that Science shelves should be bereft of such gems as Michael Behe’s intelligent-design manifestos, or any book on new-age pseudoscience.

It’s with this that I must take issue. When, in my email to Dr Myers, I referred to the democratic marketplace of ideas, I was not paying lip service. It is a fundamental tenet of western democratic society that as long as nobody is literally hurt, every opinion has a right to be heard. I’m not saying that every opinion is worth the paper it’s written on, just that anyone has every right to make their case. This is especially the case in the rigours of the scientific process, where any theory—new or old—is continually vetted by a process of peer review and critique.

In the case of Behe’s ID idiocy and New-Age acupressure guides, they belong squarely in the science section. The questions that they address (Who are we? How did we get here? How can the flow of Chi affect my basement grow-op?) are fundamentally scientific ones. Just because a particular author’s answer to a real scientific question is completely insipid does not mean that it does not belong on the Science shelf.

Call me Naïve, but I truly want to believe that in the great marketplace of ideas, theories will ultimately rise and fall on their own merits.

If you want to rid your local science section of wastes of wood-pulp like Behe’s books on Intelligent Design, here’s how to do it.

Let his opinion be heard.

There is only one appropriate response to a ridiculous proposition, and that response is thorough ridicule. Give Behe and his ilk a seat at the table. Engage him. Expose his ideas for the unscrupulous shams that they are. I’m not advocating that anyone treat fools with kid gloves—far from it. All I’m saying is, give these people just enough intellectual rope to hang themselves with, then help them build their gallows.

That article sums up some of what we do here at BoF. It’s great fun pointing out how foolish the “freedom fighters”, Concerned “Women”, and Family “Researchers” are, but our fun has a very real purpose. These people want to pull our society back to the Dark Ages. Ridiculing these ideas is one of the best ways to expose them for the frauds that they are.

Yesterday we looked at the advertisement that crackpot creatard Kevin Wirth wrote to try to get us to buy his crappy Expelled knock-off, a book called Slaughter of the Dissidents. The book is written by non-expelled young-Earth creationist Jerry Bergman.

That right there is an interesting point. This whole “doubting Darwin” campaign is the brainchild of the “Intelligent Design” folks, such as the Discovery Institute and Kevin Wirth’s own adorable Access Research Network. These old-Earth creationists insist that their “theory” has nothing to do with religion. So what do they do? The Discovery Institute goes out of their way to promote Ben Stein’s movie, which directly links ID creationism to religion. Then Kevin Wirth goes out of his way to publish and promote a book written by a young-Earth creationist. These people are even incompetent at hiding the religious basis of their “theory”!

I took Kevin up on his offer of receiving a free chapter from the book. He sent me chapter 18: “The Peloza, Bishop, and Johnson Cases”. Apparently that’s all this book is, just a long, itemized list of all the alleged cases of “Darwin doubter discrimination”. What a scintillating read that must be! Well, let’s get scintillating!

As a result of attempts by Darwin skeptics to secure a place both at the table of scientific discussion and in the classroom…

These so-called “Darwin skeptics” don’t belong in the classroom until they secure a seat at the table of scientific discussion. And they don’t belong there until they actually come up with some evidence. Whining about being left out or going to court isn’t the way to remedy things. The answer is much simpler. Just give us some scientific evidence. They’ve had 150 years, and they’ve yet to provide any.

…the federal courts have put evolution “virtually beyond criticism.”¹

That superscript leads you to the footnotes for this chapter. It’s five whole pages of footnotes! Almost every footnote is to document some quotation that they mined from elsewhere. There’s a total of 78 footnotes for this chapter alone! This book is just one giant Kevin Wirth quote dump!

Court rulings in cases involving those who are open critics of Darwinism have been blatantly discriminatory, dishonest, and unconstitutional. Indications now exist that the Supreme Court is aware of this and may try to correct this problem in future rulings.

So Bergman, a non-lawyer/non-Constitutional scholar, thinks that when his side loses, the ruling is unconstitutional. Protecting the First Amendment is the definition of a constitutional ruling, but Bergman is pouting that impartial courts clearly see that his guys are wrong. Then he tells us that the Supreme Court needs to step in. Why? So the activist judges can legislate from the bench?

In past cases involving Darwin skeptics, my research of over 100 cases over the past 30 years indicates that schools typically presented trumped-up and often obviously bogus reasons for dismissal or denial of tenure such as incompetence, erroneous claims that a faculty member falsified documents, or other allegations that were clearly proposed to cover up the real reason—religious discrimination.

Of course it never crosses Bergman’s mind that maybe those were the actual reasons! Remember that the movie Expelled presented just a few cases of alleged discrimination. You would think that those cases would be the strongest examples. Yet in every case, discrimination is not the real story.

Bergman then gets into the specific cases that this chapter is devoted to: The Peloza, Bishop, and Johnson Cases. I don’t have access to all of the materials that Bergman does, so I have no way of knowing what the real story is. It’s fair to assume that these cases are no stronger than those portrayed in Expelled.

The Bishop case is a possible exception to this. On its surface, and as portrayed by Bergman, it does appear that maybe the courts went too far. Allegedly, Bishop, a college professor, mentioned very briefly that he “doubted Darwin”, and that’s the extent of what he said. Supposedly he spent no more than 2–5 minutes out of the entire 2250 minutes of class time. I have no problem with a professor very briefly mentioning this. In fact, I would think it’s beneficial for the students to know what the professor’s biases are, so they can be aware of how they might color his instruction.

As we’ve seen from Expelled, cases like this are seldom exactly as portrayed by the creationists in their whine-fests. I would certainly be open to finding out more about this case, but I can’t take Bergman at his word here. His book has not managed to prove its credibility in the rest of this chapter.

Throughout Bergman’s discussion of these cases, he repeatedly makes two assertions: That evolution is atheistic and that creationism isn’t religious. Both of these assertions are false.

Evolution is atheistic in the same way that history is atheistic. Neither assumes a divine influence or guiding hand. What’s doubly puzzling is how Bergman can “see” the atheism in evolution, but he can’t see the obvious religion in creationism. He tries to frame the creationism as merely “anti-Darwin”, but this is a mere word-game.

Creationists like Bergman get so hung up on linking evolution to Darwin (apparently trying to paint biology as a cult of hero worship) that they get snagged on the many parts of evolution that are non-Darwinian. Darwin only proposed natural and sexual selection as the mechanisms by which evolution took place. Our understanding is much more complete now. The scientific literature is full of non-Darwinian articles. This fact alone puts the lie to everything Bergman writes in this book and Stein says in his movie.

Inspired by the minor motion picture! You’ve gagged through the movie, now gag through the book! Yes, if you couldn’t get enough of the movie that is coming soon to a $1 bargain bin near you, now you can read about even more made-up stories of “Darwin-doubter” persecution!

Crackpot creatard Kevin Wirth hopes to cash in on the Ben Stein blandwagon. He’s publishing a book by one of the “hundreds” of alleged expellees, Jerry Bergman. As we saw yesterday, Bergman wasn’t “expelled” for being a creationist. He was fired for lying about his credentials.

Kevin has given his book the rather salacious title Slaughter of the Dissidents. Let’s see what Kevin says on the book’s web page:

By now you’ve probably heard about that infamous movie so many people are talking about called EXPELLED, starring Ben Stein.… I urge you to hurry up and go check it out while it’s still playing for a limited engagement at your local theatre.

It’s a limited engagement, because the auditoriums are empty! Despite a strong opening weekend (due to subsidized tickets), word of mouth killed this turd deader than Kevin’s chances of actually understanding evolution.

Slaughter of the Dissidents picks up where that movie “Expelled” leaves off.… On another front, perhaps you’ve heard about the Evolution Academic Freedom Bill making the rounds in various states these days?… The purpose of this bill is to protect the rights of students and educators to dissent with aspects of evolution without fear of reprisal. Yep, it’s become so bad we need to pass a law to protect these people! Actually, our existing laws should be sufficient, but the courts have seen fit not to uphold the rights of victims of this type of discrimination.

That’s because there are very few, if any, victims at all. The courts have found in almost all cases that no discrimination occurred.

As you read it you’ll discover that one of the most precious things we own is at risk, right here in America. What is that? In a word,

FREEDOM

Freedom to disagree without losing your job or being denied an earned degree. Freedom to tell people you dare to question any aspect of evolution on scientific grounds - without referencing any religious text.

Really, Kevin? And just what would those scientific grounds be? You never present any. Instead, you just whine that people who pretend to have some and never show it are victims.

Now How Much Would You Pay?

And speaking of religion, it looks like we live in an era where freedom OF religion has been twisted to mean freedom FROM religion.

Actually, Kevin, freedom of religion has always included freedom from religion. But that sure is a bizarre thing to bring up right now, isn’t it Kevin? I thought your whole argument for your creationism these days was that it wasn’t religious. Now you suddenly need to bring up religious freedom? Why does that cut so close to home when you’re talking about doubting evolution?

And the reaction of those who seek to harm Darwin skeptics for their crime of doubt is palpable, almost visceral.… The modern evolutionary elitist thugs leave no stone unturned in the wake of their rabid assault againt [sic] the freedoms of Darwin skeptics.

Kevin’s putrid purple prose is pathetic. People with such overwhelming persecution complexes are usually confined to mental institutions. When’s the last time you were evaluated, Kevin?

The root of this issue is freedom (not the self-serving sanctity of science as the opponents of Darwin skeptics argue…)

No Kevin. You’re wrong on both counts. It’s not about the “self-serving sanctity of science” (whatever that means). It’s that creationists like you are pretending that there is reasonable doubt about evolution, so you can sneak your disguised religion—”intelligent design” creationism—into the public schools, in violation of the First Amendment. You are the enemy of freedom here. You are trying to infringe upon our most precious freedom. The freedom of (and from) religion.

The author of this book, Dr. Jerry Bergman, has been the victim of this type of discrimination himself.

No. As we discussed yesterday, he hasn’t.

There is no one better qualified than Jerry to bring you this book.

No. Somebody who actually was the victim of this type of discrimination is better qualified than Jerry to bring us this book. Tell you what, Kevin. You go find that person, if he exists, and then we’ll read your book.

But Wait! There’s More!

Next, Kevin gives us some highlights of this book. OK, if we must. Let’s slog through them:

Which sitting jurist actually ruled on one of these cases before he was appointed to the Supreme Cour? [sic]

I don’t know, but I hope your book is better proofread than this ad.

When is it OK to teach ID or creationism at most universities?

In comparative mythology classes.

What are the landmines you absolutely must avoid if you are an educator?

Teaching creationism! (duh!)

What is the most common (but incorrect) assumption made by most Darwin Doubting educators that often leads to their termination?

Believing that there is legitimate scientific doubt about evolution.

What are the various situations that have spelled doom for the careers of hundreds of educators and scientists?

Wasting time talking about creationism instead of doing legitimate research and getting published in peer-reviewed journals.

Is it really true that there are no peer-reviewed articles published in reputable science journals written by Darwin skeptics?

No. Anti-evolutionists have been published, but they confine their articles to matters not directly linked to evolution. There have been no creationism articles published in legitimate peer-reviewed journals.

What academic institutions have had incidents where educators were let go, or were pressured to change their curricula, or were thwarted in some way from getting a degree or were marked down on their grades?

I don’t know. There sure weren’t any in Expelled.

But You Won’t Pay $300! You Won’t Pay $200! In Fact, You Won’t Even Pay $100!

As is typical in internet marketing, there’s no price listed at the end of the ad. In fact, you can’t even buy the book. He says it’s being released on May 30th. Instead, he tries to get you onto his mailing list, where he can ply you with spam after spam, extolling the virtues of the book, until he’s managed to expel every one of your brain cells and you buy the book. In exchange for getting spammed, Kevin promises to send you a free chapter of the book.

I’m taking a bullet for you people here. I gave him my email address, so I could get the free chapter. We’ll look at that tomorrow.

Our old buddy, crackpot creatard Kevin Wirth is publishing a book! But don’t worry. He didn’t write it. He’s only the publisher. I don’t need the type of book Kevin could write. I already have several books of quotations.

The book that Kevin is bringing to market is written by some clown named Dr. Jerry Bergman, and it’s called Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth about Killing the Careers of Darwin Doubters. I’m sure it’s a good book. We can rely on Kevin to bring us nothing but the highest caliber of ideas. Kevin is, after all, the guy who told us that Ben Stein is the modern Rosa Parks.

Before checking out Kevin’s book, let’s find out some more about the clown who wrote it. Jerry Bergman’s Wikipedia entry says:

Dr. Bergman is an adjunct associate professor at Medical University of Ohio and also teaches biochemistry, biology, chemistry and physics at Northwest State Community College in Ohio. He has taught at the college level for 35 years including seven years at Bowling Green State University, 6 years at the University of Toledo, and 20 years at Northwest State.

It then goes on to list a buttload of legitimate degrees this guy has. The one blemish is that his Ph.D. comes from the (now defunct) unaccredited Columbia Pacific University. This is the same esteemed pillar of higher learning that gave a Ph.D. to pop-quack John Gray (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, his Degree is from Neptune). In Bergman’s case, it really doesn’t matter how good the Ph.D. is. He has enough other credentials that we can agree that the guy is a good scholar, even if we disagree with his opinions. In fact, he apparently has a good track record of getting published. Wikipedia says:

He now has over 700 publications in a variety of scientific and popular journals….

That statement doesn’t tell us which publications, the subject matter, and how many were peer-reviewed, but I’m happy to concede that a large chunk of that 700 could be real science.

OK then. The guy seems legitimate. He’s not some drooling ignoramus that Kevin Wirth pulled out of the audience at The 700 Club. Let’s see what else Wikipedia says:

Bergman’s opinions on creationism are often published by Answers In Genesis.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Otherwise-intelligent people are blinded by their religion. Well, if you’re going to be a creationist, you might as well go whole hog. Don’t be one of those wimpy Discovery Institute (“OK, we’ll give you microevolution but not macro!”) Old-Earth Creationists! No siree! You want to be the worst of the worst: An Answers in Genesis (“T-Rex ate coconuts in the Garden of Eden!”) Young-Earth Creationist! Accept no substitutes! (Except for logic. You’ll need to use substitute logic. And evidence. You’ll need to substitute fake evidence for real evidence. And persecution. You won’t really get persecuted, so you’ll just have to pretend you are.)

In the 1990s he was also known for his Usenet postings to the talk.origins newsgroup. Many of his views are highly controversial, such as implying a causal relationship between Darwinism, Nazism, and the Holocaust.

Oh. He’s a Steinist.

Bergman was involved in a tenure controversy early in his career. Wikipedia says that he was originally hired by Bowling Green State University. He did not receive his Ph.D. on the expected timetable, so his employment at BGSU became tenuous. Ultimately:

In 1978 Bergman was denied tenure. Bergman believed this was due to his involvement in the creation movement and his religious beliefs and subsequently filed with both the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Ohio Civil Rights Commission on the grounds that he had been discriminated against on the basis of religion, with both agencies ultimately ruling that he was not let go due to his religious beliefs, but because his peers voted to terminate him.

Like the typical creationist who won’t let go of his beliefs even when presented with clear evidence to the contrary, he wouldn’t accept the ruling:

Bergman filed suit against Bowling Green State University in federal district court in 1980, alleging that his due process rights had been violated and that he had been denied tenure on the basis of his religious views.… The case was dismissed in 1985. Bergman appealed but the appeal was turned down in 1987. The court ruled that the reason he was let go was because of ethics, namely that he claimed to have credentials in psychology when, in fact, he “had no psychological credentials.”

Bergman apparently is still convinced that he was discriminated against, or else he wouldn’t have written this book that Kevin Wirth is shilling. Isn’t it interesting that somebody with over 700 publications to his credit couldn’t find a legitimate publisher for his book? The fact that he had to stoop to using the services of somebody as unqualified in logic as Kevin Wirth suggests that Bergman’s book is, like his discrimination lawsuits, wholly without merit.

Tomorrow: Kevin Wirth tries to sell us some tripe.

I guess at some point I’m going to have to read Neil Shubin’s book, Your Inner Fish. People in the blogosphere keep pulling out interesting tidbits.

Life started in the oceans, so there is much within us that harkens back to our youth in the high seas. The Panda’s Thumb points us to an article that you can find in the University of Chicago Magazine or over at RichardDawkins.net. The article is excerpted from Shubin’s book. Here is one choice excerpt:

In many ways, we humans are the fish equivalent of a hot-rod [VW] Beetle. Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers—and you have a recipe for problems. We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price. In a perfectly designed world—one with no history—we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.

Nowhere is this history more visible than in the detours, twists, and turns of our arteries, nerves, and veins. Follow some nerves and you’ll find that they make strange loops around other organs, apparently going in one direction only to twist and end up in an unexpected place. The detours are fascinating products of our past that, as we’ll see, often create problems—hiccups and hernias, for example. And this is only one way our past comes back to plague us.
…
Virtually every illness we suffer has some historical component. The examples that follow reflect how different branches of the tree of life inside us—from ancient humans, to amphibians and fish, and finally to microbes—come back to pester us today. Each of these examples show that we were not designed rationally but are products of a convoluted history.

He then gives several fascinating examples of how problems such as heart disease, obesity, sleep apnea, hernias, and hiccups are the direct result of our prior evolutionary incarnations as fish, amphibians, and early mammals. He also repeatedly shows how none of this exhibits intelligent design.

Yet more overwhelming evidence for evolution. Yet more overwhelming evidence against creationism. You’d have to be extremely ignorant or extremely stupid to be a creationist these days.

I’ve been researching church/state separation, and I came across the case of Abington School Dist. v. Schempp from 1963. I’ve been aware of this case for a while, but I didn’t know much of the details. This is the famous case where Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the most-hated woman in America™, allegedly got prayer kicked out of every public school in all 50 states. The reality is actually more nuanced than that.

Two of the books I’m referencing here are The Living U.S. Constitution (by Padover and Landynski) and Why the Religious Right is Wrong about Separation of Church and State (by Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State).

(Buy Living Constitution or Religious Right is Wrong at Powell’s)

The first thing that jumped out at me is that I’ve been fighting this battle with only half an arsenal. I’ve been fixated on the Establishment Clause, but I’ve been ignoring the Free Exercise Clause.

First, here’s the entire First Amendment, to provide context:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That’s a very sweeping amendment. Many of the most important rights are all included in just that one paragraph. That’s why it was placed first (unless you’re Charlton Heston, in which case I guess this one was placed first as a diversionary tactic).

The Establishment Clause is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…

The Free Exercise Clause is:

…or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

These two clauses are two sides of the same coin. The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from establishing, endorsing, or favoring one particular religion. The Free Exercise Clause protects your religion from government interference.

Abington v. Schempp

Now let’s dig into the court case. Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s role was important, but not nearly as great as both she and her detractors claimed. As Rob Boston puts it:

As history indicates, several states had already removed school-sponsored devotional exercises, some as early as 1890, long before O’Hair arrived on the scene. Secondly, O’Hair’s case was only one of three cases heard by the Supreme Court in 1962 and 1963 concerning school prayer.

Boston continues:

O’Hair … filed her case to block the mandatory recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in Baltimore public schools at the start of the school day. At the same time, Pennsylvania resident Ed Schempp was pursuing litigation to stop mandatory devotional Bible reading in Philadelphia-area public schools….

The Supreme Court agreed to hear both cases, under the combined name Abington Township School District v. Schempp. With a vote of 8 to 1, the Court struck down both religious exercises in their 1963 decision.

The Fundies are Revolting!

The right-wing reaction to this decision was (and continues to be) massive outrage. As Boston says:

Newspaper editorials denounced the ruling, and politicians across the country took up the cause of “restoring” prayer to public schools.

This is the same rhetoric we hear today every time the fundies perceive a slight against them, real or imaginary. The most disturbing thing about their reaction was their frequent claim that they had to “restore” prayer to the public schools. You can only use that word if prayer belonged there in the first place. It clearly does not. It’s like telling a cancer survivor that you need to restore the cancer to their body.

After this ruling, there were numerous attempts at a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. Fortunately, these attempts failed. I wish I could be equally confident that such attempts would fail today.

The Ruling

Now I want to examine the decision itself, to see what we can learn from it. The Supreme Court always looks at precedent, so the text of this decision can influence future separation cases.

Justice Thomas C. Clark wrote the majority opinion. He started off, quite ominously, with:

It is true that religion has been closely identified with our history and government. … In Zorach v. Clauson, … we gave specific recognition to the proposition that “[w]e are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” The fact that the Founding Fathers believed devotedly that there was a God and that the unalienable rights of man were rooted in Him is clearly evidenced in their writings, from the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution itself.

This isn’t too bad, yet. I have no quibble with the claim that most of the Founders had a god-belief. But Justice Clark continues:

This background is evidenced today in our public life through the continuance in our oaths of office from the Presidency to the Alderman of the final supplication, “So help me God.” Likewise each House of the Congress provides through its Chaplain an opening prayer, and the sessions of this Court are declared open by the crier in a short ceremony, the final phrase of which invokes the grace of God.

His inclusion of this text implies that this form of ceremonial deism is acceptable. This bodes ill for any attempts to remove God from the Pledge of Allegiance or our money. I contend that just because something has been done that way for a hundred years doesn’t make it right.

Further on, we read (citing the earlier case Zorach v. Clauson):

It is insisted that unless these religious exercises are permitted a “religion of secularism” is established in the schools. We agree of course that the State may not establish a “religion of secularism” in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus “preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.… We do not agree, however, that this decision in any sense has that effect.”

This is an important distinction. Fundies claim that various groups (virtually any group that they are not members of) are demanding “special privileges”. The Court is saying here that they will not favor no-religion over religion. That is a fair application of the First Amendment. It allows religion to exist in public. Just where do you draw the line, though?

Later in that same paragraph, Justice Clark writes:

Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.

There is a move afoot by fundies to teach the Bible in the public schools (as “history” or some other silly notion). I’m planning an article on that sometime soon. The Court’s statement here shows their willingness to allow such behavior. (I think there was a court case that specifically addressed it. Anyone know the details?)

One of my favorite lines in the entire decision comes in the next paragraph:

While the Free Exercise Clause clearly prohibits the use of state action to deny the rights of free exercise to anyone, it has never meant that a majority could use the machinery of the State to practice its beliefs.

Bingo! That nails, right there, what the fundies have been trying for quite a while now. Just like a virus invades a cell and takes over its machinery to produce more copies of itself, radical Christians are trying to take over the machinery of the State to produce more of themselves.