4
Myth of Separation
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.
—Thomas Paine
The sign outside the Racehorse Tavern says, “God Bless America.” The bar sits just outside Dover’s dry borders, tucked back off a narrow winding road, surrounded by fields and crumbling foundations of abandoned brick farmhouses. Locals line the cigarette-burned horseshoe bar, playing online poker and talking high school football. The bartender, a surly dark-haired woman, likes to tell demanding customers to fuck themselves. But she’s a generous pour to regulars who treat her right. Johnny Cash, a jukebox favorite, sings the truth there.
Steve Stough had been drinking at the Racehorse for more than ten years, sometimes stopping off on the way home from his middle school teaching job in southern York County. Many of the men he used to sit there with are now dead. Today, the bar is lined with new faces. But they’ve changed little. They still have graying hair and deep creases around their eyes. They work in the factories surrounding York and wear scuffed orange-and-black Harley-Davidson jackets in homage to the motorcycle’s local manufacturing plant.
A science teacher and track coach in the Southern York County School District, Stough wears his white hair cropped close and looks like a drill sergeant. His face is marked by striking contrasts: He has bright blue eyes, a ruddy face, and dazzling white teeth. Stough grew up in West York, a blue-collar borough just south of Dover. He still goes to the local football games. When announcers call out the team roster, Stough recognizes their names as the sons and grandsons of his former classmates.
Stough is a Republican who opposes affirmative action. He attends church most Sundays. He believes in heaven. And he believes in hell. But his hell differs from the Lake of Fire damnation professed by those running Dover’s school board. It’s like he tells his students about his class: “You have to try to fail.”
If you put in the hours and do your homework, he believes, you should have no trouble making it past the Pearly Gates. But Stough had been following what Dover board members were doing and was outraged. As a science teacher, Stough understood that intelligent design could not be a legitimate scientific theory. He had first learned of the concept two years earlier from the head of the science department at his middle school, who warned fellow teachers that it might start worming its way into public debate. Stough knew that the idea of methodological naturalism, on which the rules of science have been firmly grounded since the Enlightenment, limits explanations solely to natural causes. He also knew that intelligent design, with its unnamed designer, relies on the supernatural world to explain how we got here. Stough’s daughter, Ashley, was in the eighth grade at Dover’s middle school—a year away from taking freshman biology. Stough believes that the idea that “God did it” may belong in Ashley’s Sunday school but not in her science class.
Although he spent much of his free time with people at the Racehorse, Stough still felt like an outsider. If he asked the people there, they would probably tell him that God should be taught in public school. Stough, who is uncomfortable with confrontation, knew this and tried to be sensitive to their views.
He wrote an e-mail to his sister in Atlantic City, complaining about what was happening back home. Her reply: “So, what are you going to do about it?” He thought about it for a bit, picked up the phone, and called the American Civil Liberties Union.
Stough wasn’t alone. That fall, parents throughout the district faced similar fears and concerns. Following the board’s October 18 vote to amend the science curriculum, the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State began a search for Dover parents interested in suing the district. In newspaper interviews, their lawyers urged residents to contact them. The ACLU set up a special hotline for district residents.
Just as Stough did, other residents sought the opinions of family and friends. Some prayed for guidance. Barrie Callahan, whose persistence brought Bonsell’s and Buckingham’s creationist agenda out into the open, felt burned out with civic duty since losing her reelection bid a year earlier. But Callahan is proud to consider herself patriotic. She gushes when talking about our Founding Fathers and this nation’s principles. She has a mailbox painted red, white, and blue and carries a copy of the Bill of Rights in her purse. She approached the pastor at her Unitarian Church. “Pastor Bob,” as Callahan refers to him, told her this attack on evolution was likely part of a national movement led by religious fundamentalists. His words cautioned her. Callahan wasn’t interested in tackling a national cause. But neither was she interested in turning her back on what she felt was an important issue in her community. She, too, called the ACLU. Then she told her husband, Fred, that if a lawsuit was filed, she was signing him up as well.
Tammy Kitzmiller’s younger daughter, Jess, was already enrolled in Jen Miller’s biology class when the board changed the curriculum. She would be one of the first students affected. Tammy Kitzmiller is a reserved single mother of two high school- age girls. She grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family in a tiny town just north of Gettysburg, but she has always been skeptical of organized religion. In Sunday school, she was the problem child. When the teacher told the class that all life was created six thousand years ago and the earth was destroyed by a great flood, Kitzmiller raised her hand. “Then how did Noah fit the dinosaurs on the ark?” she wanted to know. Stough saw intelligent design as an assault on science. Kitzmiller saw it as religion, something only she should be teaching her children.
Still, she was hesitant to take the first step alone. She had only recently moved to the neighborhood and had not yet gotten to know her neighbors. She approached a man who lived across the street and asked him if he was concerned with the new policy. He asked her if she was an atheist.
Kitzmiller also eyed her next-door neighbor Cyndi Sneath. Sneath’s boys, Griffin and Nate, were four and seven and played in the tiny creek that stretches along the back of Kitzmiller’s property. They track deer footprints that cut into the mud along the bank. Nate is dreamy and likes to draw pictures of trucks. Griffin considers himself an authority on most matters and wants to be an astronaut when he grows up.
Kitzmiller saw Cyndi Sneath outside, smoking a cigarette as her dogs ran around the backyard. Kitzmiller walked up to the rail fence dividing their property. A farmer’s open field stretches behind their split-level houses almost to the borough square. When the high school football team plays at home, music from the marching band carries across the field and into their neighborhood. Standing in the long shadows of the late October afternoon, the two women talked about what they feared was happening to their children’s education.
The next day, Sneath contacted her state lawmaker, who told her there was little the state could do. In Pennsylvania, local school boards are granted much autonomy. Sneath’s only options were to sue the district or vote the board members out of office.
Sneath stewed for the next several days, thinking of little else. She and her husband, Paul, own an appliance repair business in West York, only a few blocks from Alan Bonsell’s radiator shop. Going over inventory in the store late one night, Sneath couldn’t take it any longer. She picked up the phone at the front counter and called the ACLU. She figured it was too late for someone to be in the office, so she expected to leave a message. That night, Paula Knudsen, an ACLU staff attorney in the Harrisburg office, was working late, sifting through the hotline messages from Dover residents. Some people called to refer someone else. Others called to say they supported what the ACLU was doing but were afraid to come forward themselves. Some said they feared what their neighbors would say, or their families, or the people at their church.
When Knudsen picked up the phone, Sneath expressed her concerns. Knudsen briefly outlined how a lawsuit would work. “Sign me up,” Sneath said. She went home and told her husband that she planned to sue the district. Paul just nodded. He supported his wife and agreed with her. But he also knew that when Cyndi’s mind was made up, no one could change it. The next day, she approached Kitzmiller. Knudsen had told Sneath that attorneys wanted to talk to parents whose children were already taking biology. Kitzmiller decided to sign up, too.
As Dover parents wrestled with what to do, others farther away got ready. One morning in late October, Eric Rothschild, a thirty-seven-year-old partner in the Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton, sat down at his desk and found he’d received an e-mail from the National Center for Science Education. Eugenie Scott, NCSE’s executive director, who once thought a Dover test case was too good to be true, asked Rothschild if he’d be interested in participating in a possible lawsuit. The ACLU didn’t have the resources to pursue it alone. An energetic and tense corporate attorney, Rothschild fired back an e-mail eagerly offering assistance. Rothschild specialized in the complex and technical legal world of reinsurance and commercial litigation. He participated in defending Three Mile Island’s insurers in a class-action suit brought against the nuclear power plant’s owners. Three Mile Island sits on the Susquehanna River fifteen miles from Dover and less than five miles from where I grew up, in Newberrytown. Following the nuclear power plant’s 1979 meltdown, residents claiming to have suffered cancer and other illnesses related to the radiation filed a class-action lawsuit. Rothschild helped dissect the flaws in the scientific claims, and the case was dismissed.
Until he received Scott’s e-mail, Rothschild considered his career fairly unremarkable. He possessed a passion for church-and-state issues. Since watching a similar battle play out in Kansas five years earlier, he had dreamed of a First Amendment case for his firm’s pro bono division.
As a boy, Rothschild hadn’t been particularly interested in science, even though his mother remembers that he possessed an aptitude for the subject. But as a Jew, a member of a religious minority, he was intrigued with what was taking place in Dover. His father’s family had fled Germany, arriving in the United States in 1938—just before Kristallnacht and the beginning of the Holocaust. Rothschild understood, if only through his family’s heritage, the cost of accepting incremental assaults on civil liberty and religious freedom.
Perhaps more than anything, what appealed to him was that the public’s debate over evolution was merely a piece of what was at the heart of the Christian fundamentalist movement.
In the presidential election that year, the Christian right rallied its base on issues of gay marriage, abortion, and public displays of the Ten Commandments. Evolution had been merely a nascent battle in the culture wars, but Rothschild recognized it as one of the issues “swimming about in that pond,” as he puts it.
All these conflicts, I believe, stem from the same source. In the evangelical faith, witnessing for the Lord is more than just an expression of one’s fervent desire to spread the good news. Converting those who have not yet been washed in the blood of Christ is essential to practicing one’s religion. It’s a strange twist that in some ways seems to pit the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause against its Free Exercise proviso—a demand for tolerance of religious intolerance.
Many of the fundamentalists I’ve encountered insist, for instance, that the Anti-Defamation League attacks Christians. Why? Because Jewish people are resisting evangelical efforts to convert them. According to 1 John 4:2-3, “Those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh are under the spirit of antiChrist.”
Eugenie Scott referred Rothschild to the Pennsylvania ACLU’s legal director, Witold “Vic” Walczak, an amiable, experienced trial attorney based in Pittsburgh on the other side of the state. Walczak had been working with the NCSE for several weeks. Something in his gut told him this was going to be an important case. He had just finished reading What’s the Matter with Kansas, in which Thomas Frank identified evolution as one of the big religious-right issues.
Like Rothschild, he sensed that Dover, in some way, was connected to what was happening across the country that fall. The evening after Dover’s school board adopted intelligent design, Walczak spoke with Eugenie Scott about pursuing a lawsuit.
Walczak possessed a natural empathy for people like Steve Stough, people who feel set apart from their community. He still remembers the moment he first felt that way himself. In 1964, when Walczak was a toddler, his family had immigrated to the United States from Europe. They settled for a while in Nashville. A Polish-speaking little boy, he had his first American party for his fifth birthday. He invited the children from his kindergarten class. He was allowed to pick whatever kind of cake he wanted, and he asked his father to make him his favorite, a mocha-walnut cake, a dense recipe carried over from Poland.
After everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” Walczak happily dug into his cake. But after a few bites, he looked up to see a table of children staring at him. Each of their slices had a fork resting next to it and only one bite missing. In a world of Duncan Hines, this was not proper birthday cake.
Walczak doesn’t say that this experience led him to the ACLU. But he remembers it as his first taste of what it was like to not fit in, to be an outsider. For whatever reason, that memory never left him.
Rothschild called Walczak. The two men spoke for twenty minutes.
After he hung up the phone, Rothschild approached his friend and fellow law partner Steve Harvey, a steel-blue-eyed Catholic in his mid-forties with striking white hair. Typically genial and outgoing, Harvey turns into an intimidating interrogator in the courtroom. Tom Schmidt, a staid attorney from Pepper Hamilton’s Harrisburg office, also joined the case.
Americans United, which had been monitoring Dover’s battle since the June board meetings, wanted to participate. The organization’s assistant legal director, Richard Katskee, a First Amendment expert known for his encyclopedic knowledge and the engaging prose he brings to his legal briefs, signed on to the case. Gangly and dark-eyed, Katskee often hides his talent with a self-deprecating demeanor so heavy that it sometimes seems like an act. But his boss, Americans United executive director Barry Lynn, says Katskee’s not acting.
Initially, Bryan Rehm, the sharp-tongued physics teacher, wasn’t interested in becoming a plaintiff. By November, he had found a job in a neighboring school district. Rather than suing the district, he wanted to join Dover’s school board and change the problem from the inside. He applied to fill one of the seats vacated by Jeff and Casey Brown. But during the public interview, Rehm quickly realized that board members had no intention of letting him join. They had already made their choices. Reading printed statements from index cards, Buckingham said, “As a board member, I can practically guarantee that you’ll be misquoted and otherwise misrepresented in an effort to keep the public inflamed and sell newspapers. Do you feel able to rise above the constant attacks on the board and to function as a rational board member?”
One by one, the candidates solemnly nodded their heads and acknowledged that it would be difficult, but, yes, they would try. When it was his turn, Rehm responded, “It is a great disservice and fallacy to teach students that a perfectly valid faith constitutes scientific knowledge. It’s time to look at these things with a new and fresh perspective that allows for input from all concerned parties. Thank you.”
Buckingham listened to Rehm’s statement and asked him a question not asked of anyone else: “Have you ever been accused of abusing a child?”
Without flinching, Rehm replied, “I have not.”
Even though he teaches science and has extensive experience in curriculum development, Rehm was rejected that night in favor of a man who home schools his children and one who is a Pentecostal minister.
Rehm stands six-foot-five with broad shoulders and heavy-lidded eyes. He is often impatient and unable to sit still. His legs jitter when he tries, the result of what he calls “an undiagnosed motion disorder.” He frequently responds to questions with uncomfortable stares and long pauses. He’s just composing his thoughts, but to the questioner, it can be terribly intimidating. To his friends and family, he is loyal and dependable. Physically, his wife Christy is strikingly his opposite. An English teacher, she is warm and bubbly with long dark hair. Her husband is angular; she is soft and curvy. She drinks Jameson whiskey. He won’t touch coffee.
That summer, Christy gave birth to their fourth child. Their home is chaotic and full of energy and everyone talks at once. For Bryan, church is a much-needed time for quiet spiritual reflection. He and his wife teach summer vacation Bible school. Bryan plays guitar and Christy sings in their church choir. They met as teachers at the local vocational-technology school. Other teachers thought Bryan was odd and ignored him. Christy felt sorry for him.
Bryan grew up just outside of Harrisburg. His mother is a retired schoolteacher. His father worked at the American Can Company. In college, Bryan considered a career as a sound recording engineer. He ran sound for several Christian rock bands.
Christy Rehm grew up in an isolated stretch of the Conewago Hills, born to teenage parents. As a girl, she remembers feeling lonely, cut off from friends. During her senior year at Dover Area High School, she became pregnant. She never married the baby’s father. As a single mother, Christy worked her way through college, majoring in English and journalism.
Fifteen years later, Christy still goes to school, now working on a doctorate in educational policy. Today, her oldest daughter, Alix, is a feisty, dark-haired fourteen-year-old with a sharp wit. She goes to school with Alan Bonsell’s daughter, Victoria.
That year, Alix and Victoria debated religion and science. Students called Alix “Monkey Girl.” But, Alix, who inherited her mother’s passion and strength, is quite capable of standing up for herself.
After a school board meeting that fall, Paula Knudsen approached Bryan Rehm. She suggested that he might want to participate in a lawsuit. He and Christy thought about it for a few days and agreed.
Beth Eveland, a paralegal, Girl Scout leader, and mother of two little girls, signed up. She lives across from Harmony Grove Community Church, where Bill Buckingham worships. She didn’t believe that Buckingham and Alan Bonsell were motivated by improving science education.
Julie Smith, a single mother and devout Catholic, agreed to join a lawsuit. Her high school daughter, Katherine, was a member of Dover’s Bible Club. Joel Leib, an artist and teacher, signed up, along with his common-law wife, Deb Fenimore. Between them, they have five children.
Leib looks like an aging Civil War soldier: He has a droopy mustache and long hair shot with gray that he pulls back in a ponytail. Leib family roots in the area stretch back to the 1600s and the original William Penn land grants. Just outside Dover, in the village of Admire, May’s Meeting House stands in an open field. The small brick church bears the brunt of winter winds that sweep down from the northern ridge. There in a tiny graveyard, the area’s German-speaking settlers are buried: “Hier ruhen Henry Leib. Geboren den 26 Feb. 1777. Gestorben den 29 Nov. 1816.”
Today, the meeting house is padlocked, and many of the tomb-stones have crumbled away. The smell of manure from a nearby dairy hangs heavy in the air. As a young man, Leib gathered acorns from a stand of oaks that tower over the meeting house and stretch their roots into the graves of his ancestors. He soaked the acorns to remove the bitter tannins, and ground them into flour to make bread.
From the beginning, Dover’s story caught the attention of a nation bruised red and blue. The national media cast it as a small-town battle of God vs. science, and the school district became a mirror to what was playing out across the country that autumn. Evangelicals, led by patriot pastors and fundamentalist Christian talk radio, celebrated George Bush’s victory over John Kerry. With Congress and the executive branch firmly under their control, they eyed the courts as their next great battlefield.
Attorney Richard Thompson told Dover board members they had been chosen to lead the fight. As he was fond of saying, “A revolution in evolution is under way.”
In the weeks after the curriculum change, Thompson held conference calls in executive sessions with the Dover board. He discussed legal strategy as board members huddled around the phone, listening to his plans to use Dover to lead the religious revolution. Buckingham remembers Thompson talking dreamily about arguing the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Thompson boasted he had already started working on his brief.
“I was going to go with him,” Buckingham said.
By that fall, I had written several newspaper articles about intelligent design. With little experience in science journalism, I initially tiptoed around the debate of whether there was a legitimate controversy over evolutionary theory. Those with the Discovery Institute, the concept’s chief supporter, insisted to me that intelligent design wasn’t a religiously based idea. But Bonsell and Buckingham spoke candidly in interviews about their creationist beliefs and why they thought intelligent design was an acceptable compromise between their faith and what the law would allow.
In the weeks leading up to the curriculum change, Bonsell had been especially frank. He explained to me that this nation’s founders were Christians who never intended a wall to be erected between government and Protestantism. The First Amendment only applied to other religions, he told me. Bonsell wanted me to come by his garage. He had a copy of David Barton’s Myth of Separation. He asked me to read it. Then, he promised me, I would understand.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had received a copy of the book from Bonsell. The day after the board’s curriculum change, a social studies teacher e-mailed Baksa, the assistant superintendent, complaining that Dover had gone from a “standards-driven school district” to a “living-word driven school district.” Baksa wrote back, “All kidding aside. Be careful what you ask for.” He said Bonsell handed him a copy of Barton’s book and that board members were targeting the social studies curriculum next year. “Feel free to borrow my copy to get an idea of where the board is coming from,” he wrote.
Bonsell takes the same literalist approach to the U.S. Constitution that he does to the Bible. As both he and Buckingham frequently point out, “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, ‘separation of church and state.’ ”
And, of course technically, they are correct. It’s true. Nowhere in the First Amendment does it say the words “separation of church and state.”
The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .” But as Bonsell explained to me, Barton argues in his book that the First Amendment only refers to the establishment of a specific Protestant denomination. In other words,
Barton claims that Christian founders were saying they couldn’t endorse Lutheranism, for instance, over Presbyterianism. But in Barton’s view, forcing Christian beliefs on the nation’s citizens has always been fair game.
The only problem is that Barton, who had been hired by the Republican National Committee that year to rally the evangelical base, is not the most reliable source. To make his case, he cites quotations of the Founding Fathers that are either questionable or outright false.
1 Additionally, there is ample historical evidence that a wall of separation between church and government was precisely what the founders had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were deists, believing the world had been created in the past but that the creator was no longer involved in its day-to-day operations.
The word “God” appears nowhere in the Constitution. The Treaty of Tripoli, read before then-president John Adams on the Senate floor in 1798, specifically states, “As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion . . . .”
As for the actual words “separation of church and state,” the reference comes from an 1802 letter Jefferson wrote to members of the Danbury Baptist Association. The Connecticut Baptists had been seeking clarification of the First Amendment’s intent as it related to religious freedom. In response, Jefferson wrote,
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.
In early December, the administration issued a news release that accused the press of misreporting the facts. Despite published accounts, the release said, Dover would not be “teaching intelligent design.” Rather, the district would merely be “making students aware” of the concept. It also included the four-paragraph statement that would be read to students in January:
The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.
Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book Of Pandas and People is available in the library along with other resources for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.
With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.
The Discovery Institute, intelligent design’s nerve center, understood what was at stake. In a news release of its own, it announced its opposition to the statement.
Just as those with the National Center for Science Education knew the risks inherent in embarking on the wrong test case, so did those at Discovery. If the courts determined intelligent design was merely revamped creationism, it could destroy their entire movement.
With the lawsuit imminent, Discovery endorsed a biology curriculum that takes a “teach the controversy” approach or “critical analysis” of evolution, rather than one that incorporates intelligent design. The organization employed a similar tactic in Ohio two years earlier as the state was revamping its science standards. At first, the organization pushed for intelligent design in Ohio’s science curriculum, but switched to embracing a “teach the controversy” curriculum amid threats of lawsuits.
2That fall, Seth Cooper, a Discovery Institute attorney, flew to Pennsylvania and met privately with Dover’s board members in Salem Elementary School’s conference room. Cooper stared at the board members who enthusiastically wanted to help the Discovery Institute fulfill its mission. He urged them to drop the curriculum change. Convinced they were doing the right thing, board members ignored the advice and pressed on.
After the presidential election, journalists from around the world started calling on Dover. BBC news crews came to Pennsylvania and asked pointed questions. Europe, fascinated by this nation’s support of George Bush, sent reporters who searched for insight into the U.S. evangelical movement and its devoted political following. A British news crew tagged along with the Rehms to Bryan’s parents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner.
In contemporary shorthand describing America’s cultural divide, Pennsylvania is a “Blue state,” owing its sliver of a Democratic majority to its two major cities. (James Carville famously described the state as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.) The rest, especially York County, is a GOP haven.
But York County’s Republican roots are surprisingly shallow. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party held the majority, due largely to the historical antifederalist alignment of local Pennsylvania Germans. Dover was part of what was known as the county’s Black Belt—areas so steadfastly Democratic that Republican Party officials wouldn’t bother to venture there with registration petitions.
But with the 1960 presidential election battle between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the political tide began to drift right. Nixon, due to strong local connections, was a popular candidate. His parents lived for a time on a farm outside of York, and Nixon’s brother graduated from a high school just outside of Dover. Anti-Catholic sentiments among York County Protestants fueled antipathy toward Kennedy.
3Republican inroads made in 1960 flourished over the next two decades. Despite their heritage, York County voters more closely identified with conservative issues. Steve Nickol, a state lawmaker whose own York County roots stretch back to before the Revolutionary War, calls it the “grim reaper” effect. As stalwart Democrats died out, they were replaced by new registrations of voting-age Republicans. In the mid-1980s, the county finally flipped to a GOP majority.
On December 20, the plaintiffs’ attorneys announced the filing of Kitzmiller v. Dover from beneath the ornate gold dome of Pennsylvania’s Capitol in Harrisburg. The school board and its legal team may have seen Dover as part of this nation’s culture war, but the parents viewed it as an issue critical to their town. They were shocked by the turnout of the national media at the press conference.
Though Dover is a small community, most of the eleven parents named in the lawsuit had never met. Still strangers, they huddled together, leaning on each other for support as they balanced precariously on metal risers. Over their heads, circling the ceiling of the rotunda, were the inscribed words of Pennsylvania’s Quaker founder, William Penn: “There may be room there for such a holy experiment, for the nations want a precedent. And my God will make it the seed of a nation. That an example may be set up to the nations. That we may do the thing that is truly wise and just.”
Television crews stepped around the parents, setting up cameras and microphones. Tammy Kitzmiller, Christy Rehm, Cyndi Sneath, and Beth Eveland stared at the chairs, which quickly filled up with reporters. Facing the grand marble staircase leading to the legislative chambers, they wondered whether they had made the right decision.
Rothschild stepped nervously into the spotlight and said that the lawsuit wasn’t an attack on religion. No, he pointed out, many of the plaintiffs held strong religious views and were regular churchgoers. Because her daughter was already taking biology and would be among the first to be read the four-paragraph statement, Kitzmiller had become the lead plaintiff. Terrified, she waited her turn to speak. She had never spoken in public before. Her voice trembled slightly as she addressed the cameras and said she believed that teaching her daughters about religion was her right and not the privilege of the school board. As she spoke, a man in a fur hat and his wife, wearing a handkerchief covering her hair, sneaked up behind the plaintiffs. They waved fluorescent green signs for the cameras that said, “ACLU Censors Truth.”
The couple pushed closer to the parents, scaring the already frightened women until their attorney, Steve Harvey, chased the interlopers away. Later, the anti-ACLU couple pressed literature into my hand written by creationist Kent “Dr. Dino” Hovind.
The pamphlets claimed that dinosaurs and man walked the earth together.
That evening Judge John E. Jones III, driving home to Pottsville, listened to the local news and caught a report on the press conference. Intrigued by the mention of intelligent design, he wondered on whose judicial docket the civil case would appear.
That December, Dover became consumed by the battle over intelligent design. Each year, Bertha Spahr, the tough-demeanored head of the science department, baked chocolate-dipped biscotti for her teachers. Distracted by the fight, she said there was too little time and even less holiday spirit. Next year, she promised.
Steve Stough felt sick to his stomach when he thought of attending the first school board meeting following the press conference. He read of the fight that almost took place between Buckingham and Wenrich in the parking lot and feared a confrontation. But Stough was determined not to be cowed into staying away. Before he left for the meeting, he stepped into his bathroom and threw up.
He and his wife Susan pulled into the elementary school parking lot, trying to ignore the cars bearing “I support Dover School Board” bumper stickers. Christmas was only a week away. As board members formally announced they had hired the Thomas More Law Center to represent the district, the Stoughs hunched on metal chairs, scrawling their names on Christmas cards and licking envelopes.
Bryan Rehm, meanwhile, stood at the front of the room with a video camera. Perhaps sensing what board members were planning, he had asked for audiotapes of the June board meetings. Officials told him the tapes had been destroyed. Rehm began videotaping the meetings, an imposing figure staring at board members through a lens.
The board appointed Sheila Harkins its new president. In her first order of business, she changed the rules of public comment. People were permitted to address only issues already on the board’s meeting agenda. When citizens tried to talk about intelligent design, which was never on the agenda, Harkins banged her gavel and told them they were out of order.
As Rehm watched and the Stoughs signed cards, a Nightline producer and a camera crew filmed from the back of the room. Later, a producer asked Harkins to explain intelligent design. A bubbly blond with a grown daughter, Harkins tried to dodge the question. She handed him an e-mail from a supporter. He shook his head. He wanted to hear her explain it.
Backing through a door, she stammered. Finally, haltingly, she offered, “It’s exploring the scientific theories of it. Is that what you’re saying? . . . [The e-mail says] to teach the children the scientific diversities. Is that what you’re asking?” She ducked behind a door and disappeared.
One person was noticeably absent from December’s meeting. Bonsell said he had heard that Buckingham was visiting family. Board members said they thought he was in California. Then, Alabama.
Buckingham was still struggling with his OxyContin addiction and had checked himself back into a rehabilitation treatment center.
Meanwhile, the media swarmed the parents. Kitzmiller told her daughters not to answer the phone. She had gone home at the end of the day and eyed the blinking light on her answering machine. Consumed by the case, the plaintiffs seldom talked of anything but creationism and intelligent design and evolutionary theory. Finally their family members could no longer listen and turned away. But they couldn’t stop, and so they turned to each other. Stough suggested that they meet at the Racehorse Tavern. It quickly became their place for discussing strategy and exchanging information. Stough called it their security blanket, a shelter hidden down a back road. Far from the storm of controversy, they played pool and talked about what was happening to their lives and wondered together what awaited them in the new year.