Our little town of Lebec finally got its 15 minutes of fame. Were we ready for our close-up? Depends who you ask.
Ordinarily, we make the evening news only when snow clogs I-5 over the pass between Lebec and Gorman, a hamlet five miles south and just inside the Blue State County. Or when some truck driver jackknifes his semi taking out two SUVs and a power pole. Or when a runaway truck smashes into the local Jack in the Box. You know, stuff with good visuals.
Last week, we made the front page of the Los Angeles Times, and the visuals were pathetic. Who wants a photo of a high school classroom or the school district superintendent issuing a written statement that it will stop teaching “Intelligent Design” (née Creationism).
Good grief! You’d think this was Kansas. Or at least Dover, PA.
It’s not that the El Tejon school board actually reconsidered its class offering, it just couldn’t afford to defend the lawsuit brought by 11 parents and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Despite legal advice to the contrary, naming the class “Philosophy of Design” didn’t get them off the hook.
What were they thinking? The elective course was taught by the wife of the minister for the local Assembly of God Church, who said God guided her to do it. Has a familiar ring, doesn’t it?
I guess it helps to understand a little about the population of the half dozen villages that make up this mountain community of about 12,000 mostly white folks, some with a red tinge under the collar of plaid flannel shirts. They attend any of 15 Christian houses of worship, 14 of which are of the evangelical, fundamentalist, born-again persuasion. There’s one Catholic Church for the Latinos, who believe being baptized once is enough. And there’s a charming community of Mennonites, whose women wear head covers, long dresses, no makeup and home school their kids. The men have facial hair, buy up vacant lots and build nice houses on spec.
Oh, there have always been some folks here with college degrees and a stronger sense of respect for the Constitution. The UCLA vanpool makes the roundtrip to Westwood every day. Some are engineers, some professors and some scientists. And that’s where the trouble started.
One of the parents who sued the district is a scientist with the Jet Propulsion Lab, and his son attends Frazier Mountain High School. Calling the elective class “philosophy” instead of biology didn’t fool him one bit. He called the class a thinly veiled attempt to evangelize students. His son didn’t see the harm and said he thought kids were smart enough to choose for themselves. I would agree, except I don’t want my tax dollars to pay for religious zealots proselytizing.
Local residents weighed in with five pages of letters to the editor of the Mountain Enterprise, expressing divided opinions. One called the class offering an “academic and legal disaster.” Another said he thought evolution was “still an unproven scientific theory.”
That’s not my understanding, but I don’t have a dog in this fight.
See, my theory is that by the time kids get to high school they’re ready to rebel against just about everything their parents believe. I always figured religion was the safest thing to rebel against, because you’d always be forgiven when you came to your senses. When I was a freshman at Marymount I was furious when the nuns told me what books I couldn’t read and what movies I couldn’t see. I spoke right up in religion class and said I didn’t think it was particularly virtuous to live under a rock. They suggested I might be happier at Beverly High. But the sisters weren’t afraid to teach Darwin in biology class, I’ll give them that. Perhaps they recognized that most of their students would be applying to colleges where science was taught untainted by religion or philosophy.
Personally, I have no problem with courses in comparative religions, philosophy, ethics, whatever. As long as they don’t mix it up with science. And though I was raised Catholic at a time when it was verboten to attend another church even for a wedding or funeral, I just ignored all that. Heck, I had fewer Catholic friends than Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist and Jewish. When my best friend’s mother died and the family was sitting Shiva, she begged me to stay with her. I told my mother it would be unchristian not to show compassion for her grief, particularly since she hadn’t the comfort of believing in heaven. Anyway, Pope John XIII got rid of all that foolishness. It’s a shame he didn’t ditch the ban on contraception and a few other inconveniences. At least dissing Darwin isn’t one of them. His theory of evolution is taught in Catholic high schools and colleges from here to Patagonia, where the Church accepts evolution as a mechanism of God’s work. Darwin is, after all, the benefactor of Chile’s tourist economy. Thou shalt render unto Darwin . . .
As Dan Neil, a self-confessed agnostic, wrote in the L.A. Times: A lot of Americans want to replace evolutionary biology with a Babylonian fairy tale about Adam and Eve. Intelligent Design is lipstick on the pig of Creationism.
I’ll drink to that.