Teaching intelligent design is not a matter of "freedom"

This quote from yesterday's New York Times story on the Dover intelligent design case made me crazy:

For Mrs. Hied, a meter reader, and her husband, Michael, an office manager for a local bus and transport company, the Dover school board's argument - that teaching intelligent design is a free-speech issue - has a strong appeal.

"I think we as Americans, regardless of our beliefs, should be able to freely access information, because people fought and died for our freedoms," Mrs. Hied said over a family dinner last week at their home, where the front door is decorated with a small bell and a plaque proclaiming, "Let Freedom Ring."

Teaching intelligent design in a public school science class is not a matter of "freedom"! You can freely access information all you want, but that doesn't mean that a religious perspective should be taught as science by the government. Why are conservative pundits spreading this stupid argument?

Comments

[Chris Turnkey]

Design theorists argue that intelligent design constitutes a valid scientific research program aimed at understanding the effects of intelligence in the natural world. There is currently considerable debate whether this program is indeed valid, and in particular whether concepts like specified complexity or irreducible complexity, are coherently defined and can usefully be applied to actual systems in nature.