40 Days and 40 Nights by Matthew Chapman

Author:Matthew Chapman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061870620
Publisher: HarperCollins

On November 19, the school district sent out a press release containing the statement the teachers would be required to read in January before students in the ninth-grade biology class studied evolution.

At a board meeting on December 6, Angie Yingling proposed a motion to take another look at the whole matter. When no one would second the motion, she resigned.

“It’s like being on the Titanic,” Yingling told the York Daily Record. “Everyone seems to see the iceberg, but no one is steering away.”

Just as the war began in earnest, Buckingham went absent. He was not at this meeting, nor at any of the meetings in December. He was neither seen nor heard from for several weeks. Many people, including the Thomas More Law Center lawyers, tried to reach him. Rothschild and Harvey, who would soon want to depose him, were also unable to find him. His wife, Charlotte, did not return calls.

The plaintiffs finally got to meet one another on December 14 at the Harrisburg offices of Pepper Hamilton an hour or so before a press conference to announce the lawsuit. Beth Eveland had sat next to Bryan Rehm at one meeting, and another plaintiff, Steve Stough, at another, “but we didn’t know we were all players, so it all came together at that meeting at Pepper, and it was like ‘Ah, okay now I know.’”

Every one of the plaintiffs I spoke to—and I spoke to them all—described a sense of pleasure and relief at discovering they were no longer alone.

The suit charged that the school board was trying to establish religion in a public school science class, which was prohibited by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and “made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

At the press conference, Vic Walczak said, “Intelligent design is a Trojan Horse for bringing religious creationism back into public school science classes,” while Reverend Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, described intelligent design as having “as much to do with science as reality television has to do with reality.”

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among many other news outlets, covered the story in depth.

As if the school board had not had enough warnings, the Discovery Institute, the leading proponent of intelligent design, issued a statement distancing itself from what was going on:

“The policy’s incoherence raises serious problems from the standpoint of constitutional law.”

My own personal theory is that even given their propensity for recruiting oddballs, they’d spoken to Buckingham and deemed this ball too odd to suit their sophisticated game. Representatives from the Discovery Institute nonetheless attended the trial, giving them—and again this is purely my supposition—the option to claim credit if by some miracle things went their way.

Stepping into the bombast-slot left vacant by Buckingham, Thompson grandly proclaimed: “The shot was fired, and it’s down range now…The board stands fast, and the Thomas More Law Center is ready to represent them…We’ve been ready for many years.

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