The Devil in Dover

Now that summer is "over" (back to school!) I've been thinking about the books I read this summer. Naturally, the last one I finished is the one sticking with me the most, although I think that particular book would have "stuck with me" even if it had been the first one I read this summer.

The book was Lauri Lebo's The Devil in Dover, which was billed as "an insider's story of dogma v. Darwin in small-town America". The Dover trial, for those of you who don't know, was the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Board of Education, where Judge Jones ruled that the Dover policy of teaching intelligent design was a violation of the first amendment because intelligent design is a religious concept, not a scientific one. Lauri Lebo was the reporter on the scene.

However, the book was less about the trial than it was about family relationships, truth, and modern journalism. It was quite moving; Ms. Lebo had a difficult relationship with her father in the sense that he, as a fundamentalist Christian, was concerned that his daughter would go to hell if she "believed" in evolution and she, in turn, couldn't understand why her father would cling to his beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence and the un-Christian behavior of many of the members of the Dover school board who professed to be Christians (lying under oath, for example). I think most of us have family issues, and the book speaks to those.

I also found her analysis of modern journalism to be very worthwhile. These days, journalists seem to bend over backwards to be "balanced". But the fact is, "balance" is inappropriate when one reports the news. Was the U.S. government behind 9/11? There's a group of crackpots who "believe" that - and journalists report it as if it were hard news. Was President Obama elected illegally because he wasn't born in the U.S.? Again, there's a group of people who "believe" that, and so it's news. There is such a thing as truth; and the focus of modern "journalism" on news that sells, rather than truth, is as wrong-headed as can be! Not all sides are equal, and it's the job of journalism to report what's true - and some things ARE true. The nature of science is not up for a vote; the Earth is not 6,000 years old, and we did evolve from an ape-like ancestor.

Judge Jones - a conservative republican - relied on precedent in his ruling. That precedent is that the first amendment to our Constitution establishes a separation between Church and State. Fundamentalists don't like that - they believe we are a "Christian nation" and so they continue their assault on the first amendment, just as they've continued their assault on the nature of science. Both assaults are extremely dangerous, and need to be resisted with every legal tool at our disposal!