"Should I be worried about the Crips and the Bloods up here?" These
were the first words out of the mouth of Ben Stein as he entered my
office at Skeptic magazine, located in the racially mixed
neighborhood of Altadena, Calif. I cringed and hoped that the two
African-American women in my employ were out of earshot of what was
perhaps merely Stein's ham-handed attempt at humor before he began
interviewing me for what I was told was a film on the intersection of
science and religion entitled Crossroads.
That is not what the interview was about. And neither is the film,
now called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The subtitle exposes
its motif-intelligent design has been expelled from classrooms and
culture, and Ben Stein sees a sinister conspiracy at work. This
supercilious financial columnist and ersatz actor and game show host
proceeded to grill me on whether or not I think someone should be
fired for expressing dissenting views. My answer: it depends. Who is
being fired for what, when and where? People are usually fired for
reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, incompetence or
failure to fulfill the terms of a contract. If you are hired to teach
biology according to the curriculum standards of your school district
but instead spend the semester telling students that science has no
definitive explanation for DNA, wings, eyes, brains and that mystery
of mysteries-bacteria flagella-then, yes, you should be fired
posthaste. But I know of no instance in which this has happened, and
the film's examples of such alleged abuses have reasonable
explanations detailed at www.expelledexposed.com, where Eugenie Scott
and her tireless crew at the National Center for Science Education
have tracked down the specifics of each case.
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