>Stephen quotes:
> >Even so, the long-simmering national debate remains far from resolved.
> >Any discussion of the subject quickly grows emotional, raising issues of
> >morality, ethical responsibility and other implications for the meaning and
> >purpose of life. ... That same idea was central to the 1925 Scopes Monkey
> >Trial, in which teacher John Scopes was convicted of violating a state law
> >when he discussed evolution in a high school biology class. [This is false-
> >Scopes was a football coach who never taught evolution. His lawyers had
> >to get him to teach a couple of kids about evolution in the back of a
> >car, so that they could say without perjuring themselves that Scopes
> >had taught evolution!]
The University of Missouri disagrees with you. This website even has a
facsimile of the book he taught from:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm
John Scopes
John Scopes was the Rhea County science teacher and athletic coach who
willingly became a defendant in the trial. Scopes had accepted his first
teaching position in Dayton after graduating in 1924 from the University of
Kentucky, where he was taught evolution.
Scopes was only twenty-four at the time of the trial. He had boyish looks,
reddish hair, and wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was described as modest,
friendly, helpful and shy.
Scopes never testified in the trial, as it was conceded that he had taught
the theory of evolution in his general science class. His only courtroom
statement was made at the time of sentencing.
After the trial, Scopes was offered his teaching position back, but
declined. Instead he accepted a scholarship--offered as a gift from
scientists and newsmen--to attend the University of Chicago. He began
studies in geology in September of 1925. After two years of study, Scopes
was hired by Gulf Oil and sent to Venezuela. A form of blood poisoning
forced him to return to the United States in 1929. While on a second tour
in South America he was baptized and married. After waiting out part of the
depression with his family in Paducah, Kentucky, Scopes resumed work in
geology for the United Gas Corporation. From 1940 until his retirement in
1963, Scopes worked at the United Gas Corporation headquarters in
Shreveport, Louisiana.
--------------
George Rappalyea
Without 31-year old George Rappalyea there never would have been a Scopes
trial. Rappalyea was a New York City native who had come to Tennessee on a
geological expedition. After discovering a main coal vein that had
disappeared under a fault, Rappalyea was made manager of the Cumberland
Coal and Iron Company in Dayton.
Rappalyea was a sincere person of a scientific mind with a strong distaste
for Fundamentalism. Rappalyea's distaste became even more acute after he
attended the funeral of an eight-year-old boy who had been crushed between
two coal cars. The minister reportedly said, while standing by the coffin
and near the weeping parents, "This here boy, 'cause his pappy and mammy
didn't get him baptized, is now awrithin' in the flames of hell." According
to Rappalyea, "A few days later I heard that this same bunch, the
Fundamentalists, had passed that Anti- Evolution Law, and I made up my mind
I'd show them up to the world."
Rappalyea wrote to the ACLU asking if they would finance a case in Dayton
testing the Anti-Evolution Law. After getting a positive response from
Arthur Hays, of the ACLU's New York office, Rappalyea asked his friend John
Scopes whether he'd be willing to be arrested for violating the new law.
Scopes said he was willing. Rappalyea swore out a warrant for Scope's
arrest. A deputy found Scopes where Rappalyea said he'd be, in Robinson's
drugstore sipping a coke. He was arrested and four days later was indicted.
Rappalyea may also have seen the trial as a way of boosting the fortunes of
Dayton and, indirectly, his coal company, which by 1925 was experiencing
severe financial problems.
> >But unlike the Scopes trial, which pitted religion against science, the
> >Kansas standards mention neither God nor creationism, which holds that
> >God created humans whole, according to Genesis. [This is a caricature-while
> >most creationists might claim that, not all do. I don't for one.]
You may not, but the Young Earth Creationist bias of the Kansas school
board was revealed by the fact that they not only deleted Evolution, but
also deleted all references to cosmology and tectonic plates. Why remove
those things? Scientists have been measuring tectonic plate movement for
decades, it's not the least controversial. But those things prove that the
earth is billions of years old, not 10,000 or whatever is fashionable among
Creationists today. Therefore it was imperative to conceal them.
Susan
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