One endless discussion that always happens with the proposal of academic freedom bills in state legislatures is that the Darwin camp always says that they are about introducing religion into science classrooms. Even if the bill says, “this does not permit anyone to introduce religion into the classrooms,” the pro-Darwin crowd somehow misses this clause, or thinks that judges interpret bills based on the “secret agenda” of those proposing them, rather than the actual language of the bill.
I think a better way of settling this, is to formally define what constitutes legitimate scientific discussion in a science class. I think that there is, at least for biology, a perfectly reasonable reposity of standard information – Pubmed.
Pubmed is run by the NIH, and its purpose is to help the dissemination of information for medicine. Rather than argue tirelessly about what constitutes the introduction of religion into the classroom, why not just punt the definition of science to the NIH, and simply say something like “any paper indexed by Pubmed within the last 20 years should be considered a valid topic of discussion in the sciences.” That way, if someone thinks that these papers are about religion, then someone needs to explain what the NIH is doing indexing papers on religion!
I think this would give the academic freedom movement a more objective means of determining scientific discourse, and would mean that our detractors would have to spell out why they think that the NIH is incapable of distinguishing science from non-science, and why they think that the NIH is indexing papers on religious topics.
I, frankly, would enjoy listening to that conversation.