Thin reeds

Okay, this is classic Casey Luskin. He recently published a law review article of minimal interest in the Hamline University Law Review, about “teaching biological origins,” which as we know means, “finding some clever way to pretend that creationism is science so that we can teach it in biology classes in violation of the law.” He’s posted a couple paragraphs of the article over at DI’s blog. Here he mentions a case called Segraves, in which a California court rejected a Free Exercise Clause challenge against a school district for teaching evolution–that is to say, the court correctly held that teaching evolutionary science in a government school does not violate a person’s right to freely exercise his religious beliefs. But here’s Luskin’s interpretation: “This opinion is of minimal value as precedent, as it comes from a lower state court and was never officially published as a legal opinion. Nonetheless, it implies that evolution education policies may avoid establishing religion when they are based upon the legitimate secular purpose of avoiding dogmatism in the classroom.”

So, in other words, an unpublished, and therefore unciteable, decision by a trial court, which is therefore not precedent for anything, really, but which upheld the teaching of evolutionary science, is somehow precedent for the DI’s mission of teaching religion masquerading as science on the taxpayer’s dime. I have nothing against the trial court’s decision in Segraves, obviously, but it’s not exactly the strongest court opinion to cite for anything, least of all in the service of Luskin’s badly disguised defense of creationism.

You can read the _Segraves_decision here.