President Bush announced on Monday that he favored the teaching of 'intelligent design' in public schools throughout America. That theory is essentially a thinly veiled effort to teach the biblical story of creation to public school students.
According to a transcript of the president's interview with a group of Texas reporters at the White House, the president said, 'I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught...so people can understand what the debate is about.' The debate Bush is referring to is creationism vs. evolution.
Another reporter then asked Mr. Bush if he felt that the intelligent design theory is an alternative to evolution. He did not answer the question but replied, 'I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,' he said, adding that 'you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.'
Religious conservatives were quick to applaud the president's position.
'It's what I've been pushing, it's what a lot of us have been pushing,' Richard Land, the president of the ethics and religious liberties commission of the Southern Baptist Convention told the 'New York Times.'
Land added that evolution 'is too often taught as fact,' and that 'if you're going to teach the Darwinian theory as evolution, teach it as theory. And then teach another theory that has the most support among scientists.'
Many in the scientific community and those advocating a strict separation of church and state were concerned with Mr. Bush's comments.
'It sounds like you're being fair, but creationism is a sectarian religious viewpoint, and intelligent design is a sectarian religious viewpoint,' said Susan Spath, a spokeswoman for the National Center for Science Education, a group that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools. 'It's not fair to privilege one religious viewpoint by calling it the other side of evolution.'
Presently, school districts in 20 states advocate the teaching of 'intelligent design' along with evolution in public schools. Kansas is the state at the forefront of the anti-evolution, pro-creationism campaign.
