[From an attorney friend of mine:] Bill, here is an item you might want to “blog” about, relating to the ACLU and the obligation of public schools to keep books in their libraries that take positions some parents object to: An AP story today (6/22/06) in the Washington Times is headlined “ACLU: Miami can’t pull pro-Cuba books,” refers to books in Miami-Dade County’s 33 public schools’ libraries that depict Cuban children happy with Castro. The school board voted 6-3 last week to remove the books, “Vamos a Cuba,” from 33 schools, saying the books were inaccurate and had omissions about life under communism, and thus were inappropriate for children aged 5 to 7 who are the intended age-group for the book. The board acted after complaints in April 2006 by a former political prisoner of Castro, now in the US, who said that his personal experience demonstrates the books are false. The Student Govt. Assn., represented by ACLU lawyer JoNel Newman, sued to keep the books in the libraries, claiming free speech rights. The relevance to the evolution issue: in the Dover case in Pennsylvania, part of the suit related to the fact that the anti-evolution book Of Pandas and People is in the school library. ACLU was counsel for plaintiffs in Dover. Now, ACLU in Dover did not ask the court to compel removal of the books from the school library, but did ask that the students not be told in class that the book was in the library, or about the fact that the book criticises evolution. Now that ACLU is working to ensure that a pro-Castro propaganda book, stated to be false by one with personal knowledge of the facts, aimed at 5-year-olds, is kept in the Miami-Dade County school libraries, will ACLU now work to ensure that Pandas and People remains in the Dover school library?
And compare the following:
In Melvindale, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, the school board voted to purchase a number of books (including Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box) that detail specifically scientific challenges to standard materialistic theories of evolution.380 This seemingly innocuous action provoked the National Center for Science Education (“NCSEâ€Â), a Darwinist lobby in Berkeley, California, to issue a creationism “alert†on its website. NCSE director Eugenie Scott has warned that the inclusion of books such as Behe’s would have a chilling effect on science education.381 But such hysteria not only betrays the fear that always accompanies a loss of cultural control, but represents a clear attempt to suppress controversy rather than to enlist it in the service of science education, as the law not only allows but would now encourage. MORE