The intelligent design movement has conducted an organized campaign largely in the United States that promotes a neo-creationist religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering around intelligent design. A number of specific political strategies and tactics have been employed by intelligent design proponents. These range from attempts at the state level to undermine or remove altogether the presence of evolutionary theory from the public school classroom, to having the federal government mandate the teaching of intelligent design, to 'stacking' municipal, county and state school boards with intelligent design proponents. The Discovery Institute has been driving force in most cases, providing a range of support from material assistance to federal, state and regional elected representatives in the drafting of bills to supporting and advising individual parents confronting their school boards.
A feature of the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns has been extensive lobbying and public relations campaigns conducted on behalf of intelligent design proponents in order to overcome professional setbacks such as that of Guillermo Gonzalez, Richard Sternberg and Francis Beckwith. These efforts are focused on two efforts: the Teach the Controversy and Critical Analysis of Evolution campaigns. These campaigns gained prominence after the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial where Judge John E. Jones III ruled that teaching intelligent design or presenting it as an alternative to evolution was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because intelligent design is not legitimate science but essentially religious in nature.
Both the Teach the Controversy and Critical Analysis of Evolution strategies and resources for them come from the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture, the hub of the intelligent design movement. These strategies are seen as another iteration of the Discovery Institute's campaign to "defeat materialist world view" represented by the theory of evolution in favor of "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions". According to the Center for Science and Culture's weblog, at least 10 state legislatures are now considering legislation reconsidering how evolution is taught. Many of these initiatives benefit from significant legal assistance from a number of conservative legal foundations including the Thomas More Law Center, the Alliance Defense Fund, and Quality Science Education for All (QSEA). All have litigated extensively on behalf of the movement.
Famous quotes containing the words intelligent, design and/or politics:
“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently.... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)