Darwinian biologist Ken Miller ventures into the field of constitutional law and flops. In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Miller mangles a key finding of the judge in the Cobb County case. According to Miller:
The judge simply read the sticker and saw that it served no scientific or educational purpose. Once that was clear, he looked to the reasons for slapping it in the textbooks of thousands of students, and here the record was equally clear. The sticker was inserted to advance a particular set of religious beliefs…
While the ACLU claimed that the Cobb County school board adopted its textbook sticker in order to advance religion, the judge rejected that claim. Instead, the judge found that the school board adopted the sticker to advance a variety of legitimate secular purposes, including “fostering critical thinking” about evolution. The reason that the judge still ruled the sticker unconstitutional was not that the school board actually intended to advance religion, but because the judge surmised that citizens might mistakenly believe that the sticker was designed to advance religion — even though the judge admitted that it wasn’t! Basically, the judge concluded that his fellow citizens were too stupid to figure out what he himself was able to realize — that the school board had legitimate secular reasons for adopting the sticker.