This is the third of a four-part series attempting to set in historical context the current right-wing efforts to control public schools and education. We’ve talked about segregationists’ efforts to undermine public schools in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, the mutation of those sentiments in the 1970s and 80s into purportedly religious objections to increasingly secular curricula in American public schools, and the political weaponization of those objections. This issue of Activate will look at how those objections came increasingly to focus on science education and treatment of the subject of LGBTQ people in the schools in the 1980s-2000s. Again, we’ll provide you some ideas for combating these movements in the next issue on this subject.
--Karen Johnson-McKewan
Activate’s Advisors are Nikola Bozinovic, Ellen Ehrenpreis, Catherine Foster, Jon Foster, Don Keller, and Glen Van Ligten
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In 1925, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. John Scopes, a high school science teacher, decided to defy the ban. He was arrested and criminally charged and became the defendant in the case now referred to as “the Scopes Monkey Trial.” The jury deliberated for less than nine minutes before convicting him. Though the conviction was later reversed on a technicality, the trial became so notorious—and such a black eye on religious fundamentalism—that the statute was never enforced again.
But the religious right was undeterred. In the 1960s, the US Supreme Court took up a case challenging Arkansas’ ban on teaching evolution, and unanimously declared it a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Still determined to rewrite public school curricula to their liking, in the 1980s, fundamentalists abandoned the idea of banning evolution from schools and instead pursued passage of laws requiring the teaching of creationism wherever evolution was taught. They lost that gambit in the Supreme Court in 1987 in another case from Arkansas.
Still undeterred, they rebranded creationism as “Intelligent Design,” insisted it was as scientific as the theory of evolution, and persuaded state legislatures and school districts to pass laws requiring not only the teaching of Intelligent Design, but also that schools issue disclaimers about the reliability of evolutionary theory. As the District Court judge observed in a 2005 trial challenging a Pennsylvania school district’s rule, “…religious opponents of evolution began cloaking religious beliefs in scientific sounding language and then mandating that schools teach the resulting “creation science” or “scientific creationism” as an alternative to evolution.” With that, the Court struck down that rule, too. That decision was never appealed—limiting its precedential effect—and similar laws proliferated elsewhere (and remain in effect in many places today). Even President George W. Bush, ever cultivating his evangelical base, endorsed “teaching the controversy,” a way to assure that creationism remained in public school curricula under the guise of teaching “both sides” of the so-called controversy, though there is no legitimate debate about which side is science and which is not.
While the push to teach creationism continued through the 1990s and even into the early 21st century, the religious right was also at work undermining efforts in society generally (and schools in particular) to normalize gay students. The so-called “no promo homo” laws had begun in the 1970s, many of which were aimed at banning gay teachers. This campaign was quite successful: there are or have been laws on the books in 20 states that prohibit teachers from teaching about homosexuality in health-, sex-, or HIV education courses, or require teachers to portray homosexuality negatively (or as a criminal offense in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, which still have sodomy laws on the books), and that abstinence from gay sex is the only way to avoid transmission of HIV.
We will pick up this subject again in the next issue, along with anti-CRT campaigns raging today, and (we promise), we’ll share some ideas about how to push back.