A District Judge today ruled that a Dover, Pa. school board decision to require students to hear a short statement raising doubts about Darwin and suggesting intelligent design as an alternative is unconstitutional. I'm no fan of ID, but there are a lot of things not quite right about this.
First, note that, since the school board instituted the policy,
... all eight of the school board incumbents who favored teaching intelligent design were defeated in an election in November by candidates who opposed including it in the curriculum.
The political system seems capable of handling these things without judicial intervention.
Moreover, the ruling took 139 pages. Now, I'm sure the judge wanted to be thorough, but in my experience, when it takes 139 pages to explain your reasoning, your reasoning lacks clarity.
Look, I don't think ID qualifies as science; there's more than a whiff of theology in any deus ex machina, and ID certainly posits a deus operating ex the machina of the physical world. Still, it's a notion that many religions could subscribe to, so it hardly sounds like a Constitutionally-prohibited establishment of religion.
Moreover, I'm afraid that it could be too easily extended to other questions. Right now, physics can tell us why the something that there is looks the way it does. Physics can't tell us why there's something instead of nothing, and probably never will. Would a teach who asks that question, and then points out that philosophers as far back as Aristotle considered it a proof of God's existence be violating the Constitution?
I'm not sure what arguments were presented to the judge, and it's possible that he felt obliged to rule on a constitutuional issue, but constitutionality is supposed to be a last resort, and it seems to me there were lots of other outs here before getting to that.