Kitzmiller / Dover Backlash Pops Up In Washington Post

In an unadulterated, if slightly sneaky, article about the Kitzmiller decision, the Washington Post is giving ID much more credit than it deserves. The article can be found here. It does a really good job of trying to sound fair and balanced, but gosh-darn-it, wouldn't you know it, ID just gets all the time it needs to say what it wants. Here are a few of the more egregious excerpts:

But Behe and other proponents of intelligent design emphasized that the court decision would not cast them into the political and cultural wilderness. They have pushed their theory, which holds that life is too complicated to have arisen without the hand of a supernatural creator, to the center of legislative debates in more than a dozen states, and they intend to keep it there.

Of course it won't throw them into the political or cultural wilderness. This country is dominated by religious conservatives. The ruling did't try to move them out of politics or culture. It said that ID isn't science, because it's not. As to having their theory in legislative debates in a dozen states, well, I don't remember state legislatures being mentioned in the scientific method. Do you?

Some politically influential backers of intelligent design warned that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, who was appointed by President Bush, so overreached that his ruling will outrage and inflame millions of conservative and religiously observant Americans.

Please. If Judge Jones had tiptoed through the tulips on this issue and still come down on the side of "evilution", then the "millions of conservative and religiously observant Americans" would be outraged and inflamed. Of course, not all the people who fall into those categories will freak out. After all, Jones himself is a life-long Republican. And as PZ Myers pointed out recently, not all religious people disagree with evoluton.

"This decision is a poster child for a half-century secularist reign of terror that's coming to a rapid end with Justice Roberts and soon-to-be Justice Alito," said Richard Land, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and is a political ally of White House adviser Karl Rove. "This was an extremely injudicious judge who went way, way beyond his boundaries -- if he had any eyes on advancing up the judicial ladder, he just sawed off the bottom rung."

Heh. Any time I see a Southern Baptist get worked up over secularism, I just gotta chuckle. They froth at the mouth so well, after all. But seriously, Roberts and Alito are very conservative judges, true, but they aren't going to turn the clock back fifty years on science. The evidence is just too rock solid. Besides, what respectable human being brags about being a political ally of Karl Rove?!? Name dropper. The last line is the most telling, though. Judge Jones' job on the bench in this trial was to make the best, most prudent decision he was capable of making. His job was not to set him self up to climb the judicial ladder. That's the whole point of not having judges elected in the first place, so that they can be free to make decisions without fear of censure. This jackass just shows how dishonest and deceitful the judges on his side of the line are.

"The heart of science should be looking at the gaps in theory and trying to figure out what that's about," said Steve Abrams, a Kansas school board member. "This decision will perhaps have an effect on other states, but we don't talk about intelligent design."

I found this one especially funny. Kansas is so backwards that it's not even up to the level of discussing ID. That's bad. They're still stuck on good old-fashioned Bible-thumping, I guess. His first sentence is right, though. It's the first thing I've heard out of a Kansas school board member that was honest in at least a year.

Steve Fuller, a philosopher of science at the University of Warwick in England, whose politics tend to the left, said he worries that Jones's decision will drive an intriguing if still half-formed challenge to Darwinian theory out of the academy and into the theology schools. "The judge's ruling really puts the burden on the intelligent-design guys," Fuller said. "The judge's ruling that the theory is theology could become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Theology school is where ID belongs. What's so wrong with that?

William A. Dembski, a philosopher and math professor at Southern Seminary in Louisville, wrote in his Web log that the loss in Pennsylvania means thousands more young people "would continue to be indoctrinated into a neo-Darwinian view of biological origins." But he wrote that the future is bright.

Boo-hoo. I don't see Dembski wearing shades. (A hat tip to the first person to comment on that reference!)

"ID is rapidly going international and crossing metaphysical and theological boundaries," Dembski wrote. "The important thing is ID's intellectual vitality."

Funny, I would think that the important thing is THE ACCURACY OF THE THEORY!!!