LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

From Americans United:

The Religious Right's Phony 'War on Christmas': Mything in Action

An Americans United Report — 12-19-05

Religious Right leaders and their allies in the right-wing news media claim there is a “war on Christmas.” To prove their charge, they have rolled out a series of allegations involving bias against Christmas by government officials and public schools. Researchers at Americans United for Separation of Church and State looked into the most common examples of supposed hostility toward Christmas and found them largely baseless.( Read more... )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY reannon)

A fascinating and extremely detailed article, going into all aspects of the ID ruling and where classroom teachers can go from here.

"The real danger is not that teachers will start teaching creationism," says geologist Warren Allmon, the director of the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, N.Y., which features an exhibit on evolution seen by thousands of school kids every year. "It's that they will stop, or reduce, the teaching of evolution. Many now just assign [students to voluntarily read] the chapters on evolution and don't cover it in class, in order to avoid controversy."

Later in the article, the writer visits a three-part lecture series where students would hear from an evolutionary biologist, a young-earth creationist and an advocate of intelligent design. Interesting that of the three speakers, the biologist was the least interesting and least effective in describing the viewpoint. It leads to an interesting question in this issue: are more and more people falling for intelligent design because evolutionists simply aren't selling it as well?

There's a good bit in the article about that, how the Seattle-based Discovery Institute that essentially kick-started intelligent design managed to take what was considered a fringe pseudoscientific religious theory and make it front-page news in 10 years of masterfun spin and public relations. Meanwhile, evolutionists have often declined to even debate the issue, claiming that to debate it gives ID legitimacy. That might be so, but relegating the stage to ID means they win by default, as the only voices being heard are theirs.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/12/21/teachers/

(Salon will require you to watch a brief ad before reading it. It's worth it.)