The ACLU has requested that Bradley Lopez, a professor at Fresno City College in California, cease and desist from offering his religious views in his health science classroom.
When Inherit the Wind was published in 1955, the Scopes trial upon which it was based was 30 years old, McCarthyism was rife, and intelligent design was not yet the well known (though oxymoronic) phrase it has become. Since then, the play has been filmed four times, with all-star casts. Often thought to be about science and religion, one of the play’s authors, Jerome Lawrence, noted in 1996 that the play was in fact a “parable” about mind control.
Religious Indoctrination Presented as Fact
In the decades since 1955, science and pseudo-science have accounted for a wide array of lawsuits about the place of religion in education at all levels. Meanwhile (though we may rarely use the phrase “mind control”), concerns regarding a new McCarthyism have received a lot of play in recent years—especially as the internal policing of ideas has ratcheted up in the years since 9/11. Many of these cases have related to religion as it has been entangled with violence.
Today’s lawsuits similarly bring together concerns about the relation of science, religion, education, and the state, mixing in more obvious connections to gender and sexuality. The latest potential case is in California, not in Tennessee. And it is not about evolution. It is about whether an employee of Fresno City College may teach his religious beliefs as health science. Thus, the Northern California Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has written to Fresno City College (in a letter dated February 8, 2010) requesting formally that Professor Bradley Lopez—who through his employment at the community college qualifies as a state employee—cease and desist. Or, perhaps more accurately, ACLU demands that Fresno City College act to ensure that its “Health Science I” courses are accurate and unbiased. As the ACLU Press release puts it:
“The college classroom of a state school should be a welcoming environment for all students, and courses, especially health courses, should be based on objective and