Lutheran tells about his history-making, intelligent design decision When Judge John E. Jones III was invested as a U.S. District Court judge in August 2002, he “could never have imagined,” he said recently, that within four years he would appear on the cover of Time and rub shoulders at a black-tie dinner this year with others “judged” as the 100 most influential people of his time.
The case? That would be Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, in which parents in Dover, Pa., took the school board to court over an attempt to make intelligent design part of the science curriculum. During six weeks in September and October last year, Jones heard wide-ranging testimony featuring legal precedence introduced from dozens of court cases, including from the U.S. Supreme Court. Then Jones wrote a 139-page decision that made broadcast headlines within 15 minutes of release at 10:30 a.m. on Dec. 20. He concluded from the evidence that intelligent design is creationism repackaged—not science. Making it part of a public school science curriculum would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause, which bars an alliance between church and state. Some critics thought Jones went too far in ruling on whether intelligent design is science or not. “Both sides asked me to render a decision on that precise issue,” he said. “Had I not done so, there was every chance that this same issue would have arisen before another tribunal. “I didn’t think a school district somewhere else should be exposed to the costs and fees that the Dover School District ended up paying (more than $1 million) as a result of my ducking that issue.” The rest of this article is only available to subscribers. |
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 The Lutheran is the magazine of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
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