Religion Drove Board, Witness Says

In the months preceding their vote nearly a year ago to introduce the concept of “intelligent design” into the Dover Area School District’s biology curriculum, one member of the school board dismissed the separation of church and state as a “myth,” a former teacher and a former board member testified in federal court Tuesday.

Board members also urged science teachers to balance evolution with creationism or intelligent design and stalled on purchasing a textbook one member derided as “laced with Darwinism,” according to testimony.

“I saw a district in which teachers were not respected for their professional expertise ... and the reason science teachers were not respected was because of religious beliefs,” said Bryan Rehm, a former physics teacher at Dover High School and the parent of a ninth-grader there.

Rehm and former board member Aralene Callahan are among 11 Dover parents who have accused the school district and its board of violating the constitutional ban on advancing creationism or any religious belief in public schools.

They argue that the district is advancing a religious belief by requiring a statement to be read to ninth-grade biology students that they maintain denigrates Darwin’s theory of evolution and introduces the concept of intelligent design. The concept posits that there are features of life, yet unexplained by evolution, that are best attributed to an unnamed intelligent agent or designer.

Through the testimony of Rehm and Callahan, attorneys for the plaintiffs hoped to establish that some board members were motivated primarily by religious, not educational, considerations when they approved their new policy on biology.

Not so, said Robert Thompson, lead counsel for the defense, after court Tuesday.

“A policy can have a religious motivation as long as that is not the primary motivation,” said Thompson, one of three attorneys from the Christian-oriented Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., which is representing the school district at no charge.

Reiterating the defense position that the board’s prime goal was “good pedagogy” by exposing students to differing views, he said, “It is a bottomless pit once you start looking at motivation.”

Nonetheless, attorneys for the parents, a team assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, pounded away at those motivations Tuesday.

Callahan, mother of an 11th-grader at Dover High, testified that during a school board retreat in March 2003, fellow board member Alan Bonsell “expressed he did not believe in evolution and also said that if evolution was part of the biology curriculum, creationism had to be shared 50-50.”

Rehm, a teacher at Dover at the time, said Bonsell had told him that evolution was “against his religious views” and that Bonsell particularly was concerned about the idea of “monkeys to man.”

During a court recess, Bonsell, who owns an auto repair business in nearby York, said a lot of the statements attributed to him were inaccurate.

“They’re accusing us that this is religion, and it isn’t,” Bonsell, 45, said.

“This is a one-minute statement, a one-minute statement. We’re not teaching kids intelligent design, we’re making kids aware of it,” Bonsell said.

Callahan said that although the budget for the purchase of a new textbook, “Biology,” long had been approved, the board deliberately delayed for more than a year approving the actual purchase because members openly sought a book that included creationism with evolution theory.