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Scopes Trial/witchunt

this may refer to other congressional hearings/investigations, aside from "Scopes" one, see also sci suppression

but also OG

robt r

The recent ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that frozen embryos are “children” reveals the growing importance of state supreme courts in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, overruling Roe v. Wade.

So far this year, at least 14 states have introduced fetal personhood legislation — extending not only to fetuses, but also embryos and eggs. Two-thirds of pregnancy criminalization arrests are now coming from Alabama, Oklahoma, and South Carolina — whose highest courts have defined “children” to include fetuses, fertilized eggs, and embryos. If you suffer a miscarriage, you could potentially be arrested for homicide or manslaughter. State courts have become the scenes of a growing number of reproduction criminalization trials.

Contraceptives and abortion pills may be the next targets. This month, the two largest pharmacy chains in the United States will start dispensing the abortion pill mifepristone.

The Alabama ruling also reveals the growing political influence at the state level of Christian fundamentalists who believe that human life, as Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion, “cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”

And the ruling epitomizes the Christian right’s ever-more vehement attacks on science.

We’ve been here before. In the early twentieth century, some state legislatures relied on the Bible to dictate what their citizens could and couldn’t do — resulting in notorious trials such as Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, which began July 10, 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee.

John Scopes was a high school biology teacher. He was charged with violating Tennessee’s Butler Act — passed at the behest of Tennessee Representative John Washington Butler, head of the World Christian Fundamentalist Association — which made it illegal to teach human evolution in Tennessee schools.

William Jennings Bryan, the populist three-time presidential candidate and former secretary of state, argued for the prosecution; Clarence Darrow, for the defense.

The presiding Tennessee judge, John T. Raulston, quoted Genesis at the outset of the trial — just as did Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker in the recent Alabama case.

Bryan opened for the prosecution by criticizing the theory of evolution and the notion that human beings were descended "not even from American monkeys, but from old world monkeys.”

Darrow argued that the Bible should be limited to the realm of theology and morality and had no place in high school science courses.

After six days of trial, Judge Raulston declared that all the defense testimony that Darrow had presented on the Bible, much of it from Biblical scholars, was irrelevant and could not be presented to the jury (which had been excluded from the courtroom during the defense).

Darrow then thought he might be able to use Bryan to make his points in a way that could command the nation’s attention. Bryan was eager to oblige.

In shirtsleeves and his trademark suspenders, Darrow began his interrogation of Bryan with a quiet question: "You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven't you, Mr. Bryan?"

Bryan replied, "Yes, I have. I have studied the Bible for about fifty years.” Bryan then claimed "everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there.”

Darrow asked Bryan whether he believed that a whale swallowed Jonah, that Joshua made the sun stand still, that Noah survived the great flood by putting the males and females of every species into his arc, that Eve had been created from Adam's rib, that Eve had tempted Adam in the garden of Eden, and the six days of creation according to Genesis.

Bryan finally conceded that the words of the Bible should not always be taken literally, and explained that "I do not think about things I don't think about.” Darrow then asked: "Do you think about the things you do think about?" To the derisive laughter of spectators, Bryan responded, "Well, sometimes.”

Bryan charged that the purpose of Darrow's questioning was "to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible.” Darrow responded that his purpose was to prevent “bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.”

Bryan then accused Darrow of attempting to "slur at the Bible,” and agreed to answer Darrow's further questions because "I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee …" Darrow interrupted, saying, "I object to your statement" and to "your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes."

Raulston promptly ordered the court adjourned, and the next day ruled that Darrow could not put Bryan back on the stand and that Bryan’s testimony from the previous day must be stricken from the record.

Darrow did not summarize his defense. Bryan's summation, which was distributed to reporters but not read in court, provides an insight into the beliefs of the religious right even today:

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel…. Sience has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.

After eight days of trial, it took the jury nine minutes to find Scopes guilty. He was ordered by Judge Raulston to pay a $100 fine (the equivalent of about $1,900 today). The Tennessee Supreme invalidated the decision on a technicality.

Bryan died suddenly five days after the trial's conclusion.

In his autobiography, The Story of My Life, published in 1932, Darrow predicted that “it will be only a few years before the senseless [Butler] statute will be wiped from her books either by repeal or the decision of a final court.” The Butler Act was not repealed in Tennessee until 1967.

Darrow also wrote that “there is now reason for feeling confident that no more states will permit their fanatics to place them in the position of Tennessee.” Darrow’s biographer Irving Stone went so far as to declare in Clarence Darrow for the Defense that Darrow had “dealt a deathblow to fundamentalism.”

In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansasthat bans on teaching evolution contravene the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because their primary purpose is religious.

Those were the days when the U.S. Supreme Court was a bulwark against the fundamentalist right and could be counted on to buttress the wall between church and state.

But there seems little chance that the current Supreme Court will deem unconstitutional the pregnancy criminalization prosecutions coming from states whose highest courts have defined “children” to include fetuses, fertilized eggs, and embryos.

*Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.*

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an 7 25 polar?

One hundred years after the Scopes monkey trial author Amanda Opelt tells Religion News we’re still trying to win debates by abusing our opponent.

July 10 will mark the anniversary of the prosecution of educator John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in public schools in violation of Tennessee’s Butler Act. This was a case defined by Baltimore Sun writer and atheist Henry Louis Mencken, who not only coined the term ‘Bible Belt’ and ‘monkey trial,’ but also described the community putting Scopes on trial as “hillbillies,” “halfwits,” “peasants,” “yokels from the hills” and “gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range.”

Mencken writing of the trial in the town of Dayton was supposed to be satire, but Opelt argues that most news outlets accepted his take, “portraying the trial as a joke and the townsfolk as worthy of ridicule.” Mencken made no mention that town leaders had ulterior motives of generating interest in their town as its failing coal industry left the place impoverished and residents dying of black lung.

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Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan had his own well-intentioned problems with the idea of evolution, and it was not—as Mencken wrote—because his mind “hates [knowledge] because it is complex — because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for ideas.”

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“Bryan’s adamant objection to the teaching of evolution in school had less to do with its complexity and more to do with the moral implications of [evolution],” writes Opelt, suggesting it was the coldness of the theory that scratched at him.

“The Darwinian theory,” according to Bryan, “represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate — the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” Bryan stated that “he believes the law of love as outlined in the Bible, rather than the law of hate, is what leads to true progress.”

Despite that, Mencken described Bryant as having eyes looking like “sinister gems,” and “blazing points of hatred.”

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“He was a peasant come home to the dung pile,” said Mencken, who also described the town of Dayton, “as only a ninth-rate country town, and so its agonies are of relatively little interest to the world.”

“But the town’s agonies matter to me,” says Opelt, adding that rank dismissals of the other side in any argument may help “explain the legacy of mistrust for mass media among the rural and religious.”

“It also offers a vivid illustration of how prone we are to make our political and religious adversaries caricatures rather than contextualized characters with complicated stories, unique insights and real convictions,” writes Opelt. “Perhaps the trial’s most lasting legacy is the precedent it set for how we engage with our ideological enemies and the role the media play in that discourse.”

The real loser in the aftermath of the trial was probably not Scopes, who was convicted and told to pay a $100 fine (which was later overturned). Nor was it the evolutionists, says Opelt, who never saw the case make it to the Supreme Court, or even the anti-evolutionists, who became the butt of the national joke.

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“Our discourse itself suffered perhaps the most defeating blow,” she writes.

Read the full Religion News report at this link.

By Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writer 

Monday, July 18, 2005

House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.) has demanded that another senior Republican, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (Tex.), call off his investigation of three scientists who have charted Earth's rapid warming in recent decades.

The unusual public tiff between two powerful GOP lawmakers highlights the sharp divide that drives the nation's climate change debate. Barton, along with President Bush and many other House Republicans, opposes mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas emissions and questions the science underlying such efforts. Boehlert, who backs limits on carbon dioxide pollution, said he fears such attacks could chill future scientific inquiry.

In a sharply worded letter sent last week, Boehlert called Barton's probe into the findings of Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes a "misguided and illegitimate investigation." Mann will direct the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University as of next month, Bradley is a geosciences professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hughes is a professor at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/17/AR2005071701056.html

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GOP’s only scientists at ‘Scopes’ climate hearing are Richard Muller and John Christy. Go figure!

By Joe Romm on March 31, 2011 at 12:43 pm

Skeptical Science debunks more Muller disinformation

UPDATE:  GOP Chair Hall referred to the emails of “East Angeles“!

Muller says of surface temperature dataset, “Some of the most worrisome biases are less serious than I had thought.“  That’s because he doesn’t read the scientific literature!

There is a climate science -hearing- trial today at 10 am of the full House Science Committee, “Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy” (webcast here).

The Charter (here) makes clear this is a Scopes-like trial of Climategate, since it has an extended discussion of the stolen e-mails (which it claims were “leaked” — as if) along with innuendo-laden treatments of “Data Quality” and the “IPCC process.”  The Charter never mentions the multiple vindications of the scientists whose emails were stolen and of the IPCC itself — and it omits any discussion of the massive amount of data and independent analyses that underpin our understanding of climate science.  And those phony attacks  are then used to question EPA’s rather obvious finding that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases are a danger to the health and well-being of Americans.

The fossil fuel funded Tea Party and climate zombies of the GOP have turned it into the party of no science — see Tim Pawlenty: “Every one of us” running for president has flip-flopped on climate change and *National Journal*: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones.” So rather than calling this the Scopes trial, let’s just call it the Nopes trial.

The Democrats were allowed one witness and invited a serious climate scientist, MIT’s Kerry Emanuel.  The GOP had five witnesses and invited 3 non-scientists to spread disinformation on greenhouse gas regulations and costs.  Of the two actual scientists they invited, Richard Muller and John Christy, only one is actually a climate scientist.  Christy, though, is also a serial disinformer.  Skeptical Science debunked point by point his last testimony (see “Should you believe anything John Christy says?“).  For more, see House GOP line up the usual disinformers for climate science hearing.

Muller likes to claim he is an independent, apolitical physicist trying to restore “credibility” to the temperature record.  But in fact, like Christy, the Koch-funded Muller has also launched phony attacks on climate science for years (see here).  Like Christy, Muller is a serial disinformer, as we’ve seen (see “Koch-funded scientist Richard Muller makes up story about Al Gore, Ralph Cicerone, and polar bears“).  Indeed, Skeptical Science has begun a multipart debunking of Muller, which I repost below:

[Note:  SkS accuses Mueller of "misinformation" -- but the charge below has been debunked so many times in the past two years, including by the independent commissions reviewing the emails -- that it must now qualify as disinformation.  Willful ignorance of the facts -- like ignorance of the law -- is no defense.]

The most cited ‘Climategate‘ email is one from Phil Jones discussing a graph he produced for a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, where he discusses “Mike’s trick” and “hide the decline”. A number of misconceptions have arisen concerning this email. Unfortunately a prominent source of ‘hide the decline’ misinformation Professor Richard Muller from Berkeley. One of Muller’s errors is confusing several separate techniques, blurring them into a single “hide the decline”. Muller commits this error in apublic lecture (emphasis added):

A quote came out of the emails, these leaked emails, that said “let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline”. That’s the words, “let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline”. Mike is Michael Mann, said “hey, trick just means mathematical trick. That’s all.” My response is I’m not worried about the word trick. I’m worried about the decline.

Muller uses the phrase “Mike’s nature trick to hide the decline” as if it’s Phil Jones’s actual words. In a lecture recorded last weekend at Berkeley, Muller continues to expound on how Michael Mann’s trick was used to hide the decline (emphasis added):

What they said is “how can we hide the decline?” And the suggestion came back from Phil Jones at the UK, “Let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline”. Mike’s trick consisted of erasing that data, calling it unreliable, and then substituting the temperature data from thereon.

However, the original text from Phil Jone’s email indicates otherwise:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

It’s clear that “Mike’s Nature trick” is quite separate to Keith Briffa’s “hide the decline”. Muller has taken different sections of Phil Jone’s emails and morphed them into a single phrase. To understand how this is a misleading characterisation, it’s helpful to examine exactly what “Mike’s Nature trick” and “hide the decline” refer to.

What does “hide the decline” refer to?....

House Energy and Commerce “Committee from Koch” to conduct global warming witch trial

By Climate Guest Blogger on Feb 8, 2011 at 5:40 pm

This fact sheet was put together by Noreen Nielsen and CAPAF.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee plans to hold a hearing Wednesday to discuss blocking the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.  We can expect the same old half-truths, misstatements, and outright lies from the new majority, with an extra dose of special interest pandering.

The reality, however, is that the draft legislation to stop EPA from setting pollution safeguards, proposed by Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), Subcommittee Chair Ed Whitfield (R-KY), and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK)is nothing less than an attempt to give big polluters free rein to dirty the air we breathe and the water we drink. This proposed language””which was hatched at a secret meeting between the bill’s sponsors and other energy-related trade lobbyists“”would protect corporate polluters and their profits at the expense of public health. But a deeper look into the panel members’ campaign money and political ties reveals that their efforts to shield polluters from regulation should really come as no surprise:

The Koch brothers contributed over a quarter of a million dollars to House Energy and Commerce Committee panel members in 2010

The committee is stacking the witness stand with big polluters and their allies

Americans strongly support protecting our air and holding polluters accountable

Public health professionals and business leaders oppose efforts to handcuff EPA

– Noreen Nielsen and the Center for American Progress Action Fund.