American fundamentalists take book fight to court

Press, 15 October 1986, Page 29

American fundamentalists take book fight to court

By

TOM BRIDGMAN,

of NZPA Washington Sixty-one years after a Tennessee teacher was convicted for teaching evolution, fundamentalist Christians are battling the content of public school textbooks in America. A judge in the heart of Bible belt Tennessee has recently finished hearing evidence in what was known as “Scopes II,” named after the “monkey trial” of John Scopes in 1925 for teaching evolution. Another case has begun in Mobile, Alabama, where parents are arguing that public school textbooks promote "secular humanism” and exclude Christianity. The two trials, and a related case over a Louisiana law requiring the teaching of creationism that is pending before the Supreme Court, have pitched fundamentalists of the Right and liberals from the Left into battle over the education of America’s children. “These cases are not about a few schools in Mobile, Alabama, and Hawkins County, Tennessee, but about the future of public education,” says Anthony Podesta, president of the liberal People for the American Way, a group founded by a television producer, Norman Lear, to monitor the religious Right. “All over the country

ultra-fundamentalists are attacking every idea they disagree with, demanding censorship of everything from individual books to entire curricula,” he says. On the other side of the fence from P.A.W. is Concerned Women for America, founded by Beverly LaHaye, wife of a television evangelist, Tim LeHaye, a strategist for the religious Right. Apart from its concern with moral welfare, C.W.A. is an ardent supporter of “star wars,” the strategic defence initiative. “Our religious liberty is in serious danger when children in’ our public schools are forced to learn from books that degrade their religious beliefs,” says Mrs LaHaye. Michael Farris, lead counsel for the C.W.A. and who has accused People for the American Way of “rancid bigotry toward fundamentalist Christians” argued that the Tennessee case would determine whether parental right to control their children’s education “has substance or is only a shadow.”

The Tennessee case came about when a Hawkins County parent, Vicki Frost, sat down to read through a story called “A Visit to Mars” in one of her daughter’s sixth grade (11-year-olds) textbooks. Mrs Frost was offended by the story because it seemed to em-

body to her thoughttransfer, or telepathy — supernatural attributes that belonged to God alone. From then she and other parents in the area began a campaign against the books used to teach reading in the Hawkins County public schools. That led eventually to the Federal Court in Greenville, Tennessee, where Mrs Frost took the witness-stand in July. She and six other Christian familes, backed by C.W.A., sued for the right to be provided an alternative reading programme that did not conflict with their religious beliefs or for the right of the children to opt out of reading classes that taught from books they said violated their religious beliefs. “I am a born-again Christian,” Mrs Frost told the packed courtroom. “The word of God is the totality of my beliefs.” The Christian parents had objected to the county reading books on several grounds, namely that they taught evolution (Man evolved from lower lifeforms rather than was created by God), feminism, advocated humanism, showed an anti-Christian bias, raised ethical questions, dealt with witchcraft and the occult (in one story, teachers were instructed to have the children write their own magical incantations),

said it was proper for children to be disobedient to parents at times, and favourably presented such themes as pacifism. Mrs Frost told the Court she objected to a textbook’s inclusion of the influence of the Renaissance, because it said that “a central idea of the Renaissance was a belief in the dignity and worth of human beings.” “The painters of this time glorified or elevated the human form in paintings,” Mrs Frost read from the text. But, she said, God was to be glorified, not Man. The formal part of the Tennessee trial finished a fortnight ago. The Judge will deliver his decision, probably this month. Now attention has switched to Mobile, Alabama where in the Federal Court 600 Christian fundamentalist parents are arguing that the county schools use textbooks that promote "secular humanism” and exclude Christianity, making it more difficult for them to pass on their religious values to their children.

The argument over “secular humanism” — a philosophical attitude that puts man and his values, capacities and achievements rather than God at the centre of things — is central to the two court cases and the debate in general. Some fundamentalists use “secular humanism” as a catch-all cry against teachings they see as anti-Christian, antifamily, and anti-Ameri-can.

In the Mobile case the protesting parents argue that secular humanism is, in effect, a religion. They say a United States Supreme Court decision that excluded religious exercises in public schools should equally be applied to humanism. “So as others have been excluded, humanism must also be excluded,” said Thomas Parker, a lawyer for the parents. William Bradford, a lawyer for a dozen parents intervening .in the case on behalf of the schools, said, “secular humanism is not a religion. It does not have the spiritual, supernatural or transcendent that the court requires of a religion.”

Like the Tennessee case, Mobile’s has attracted powerful outside support for each side. The National Legal Foundation, a group closely associated with a fundamentalist preacher and presidential candidate, the Reverend Pat Robertson, are funding the conservative parents who have brought the case. People for the American Way

and the American Civil Liberties Union are arranging for a prominent Washington law firm to oppose it. Ironically there is one area on which both sides appear to agree — the paucity of information about religion in history textbooks. Timothy Smith, a professor of history at John Hopkins University, appearing for the Mobile parents, said he was “shocked” by the lack of information about religion in school textbooks. He said it was impossible to properly teach American history “without adequate understanding in reference to the religious forces at work.” The same view came from People for the American Way earlier this year, which said that because publishers feared controversial subjects they had failed to provide adequate coverage of religion. “What is needed is education about religion, not indoctrination for or against any set of religious beliefs,” said Mr Podesta, of P.A.W. Allied to the textbook cases is a long-running argument over the teaching of “creationism” as a balance to evolutionary theory in schools. Creationism is basically the Biblical version of the beginning of the world and plant and animal life and is now presented by its proponents as a science that has equal place in public school curricula with evolutionary theory. Louisiana in 1981 passed a Creationism Act, which outlawed the teaching of evolution unless it was accompanied by instruction in the then newly • proclaimed creation science. A Federal District Court last year struck down that law as unconstitutional, subsequently upheld by an Appellate Court but only by an 8-7 vote. Encouraged by that supporters of what is termed “the Louisiana balanced treatment of creation-science and evo-lution-science act” have taken the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that students should be exposed to the diversity of opinion on evolution. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case later this year. Creation science maintains, among other things, that the universe was created in the last 10,000 years. In August 72 United States winners of Nobel Prizes and 24 prominent scientific organisations urged the Supreme Court to rule the Louisiana law unconstitutional on the ground that the First Amendment bars the Government from “establishment” of a religion, which has been taken to mean that the Government, and in this case the public schools, may not favour one religious group over another. A Harvard University palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, said creation science was “an oxymoron — a self-contradictory and meaningless phrase — a whitewash for a specific, particular, and minority religious view in America.”