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KOPPLIn DOESn’T LOOK MUCh LIKE A giant-killer; he’s a particularly younglooking 17-year-old with the slight build of a soccer player and swimmer (his other hobbies). But when he talks, he’s as articulate as any politician, despite having a limited political portfolio. “I volunteered for [President Barack] Obama’s campaign and I volunteered for my dad’s campaign, but that’s it,” he says. (Kopplin’s father, Andy Kopplin, was the former chief of staff to Govs. Mike Foster and Kathleen Blanco, and ran an unsuccessful 2008 campaign for Congress. Today he’s deputy mayor and CAO of the city of new Orleans. In an email, he calls his son “relentless.”)
WhEn KOPPLIn DECIDED hE WAnTED to overturn the LSEA, he contacted Dr. Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Forrest is also the founder of the Louisiana Coalition for Science, a proscience, anti-creationist group. “[Kopplin] emailed me last summer and said he’d decided he wanted to tackle this as his senior project,” Forrest says. She had fought the LSEA’s passage and similar laws in other states, including the 2005 landmark case in Delaware, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, in which she was an
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What is the Lsea? he Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) was passed in the Louisiana legislature in 2008 and signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal that summer. Its controversial section — language supported by creationists and opposed by evolutionists — states that “a teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique and review scientific theories.”
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expert witness. That case resulted in a U.S. District Court ruling that intelligent design “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents,” and teaching intelligent design in public schools violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — a decision that did little to deter school boards interested in “teaching the controversy.” After the LSEA was passed, the school board of Livingston Parish commissioned a panel to study the possibility of teaching creationism in its science classes. The American Civil Liberties Union quickly howled, and the board backed off, though it didn’t table the notion completely. Livingston Parish School Board member David Tate, who introduced the idea, told the Baton Rouge Advocate, “We don’t want litigation, but why not take a stand for Jesus and risk litigation?” KOPPLIn IS OPTIMISTIC ABOUT hIS ChAnces for getting LSEA overturned in the upcoming legislative session, but the numbers are against him. LSEA was passed unanimously in the state Senate in April
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Teachers may have good reason to be wary. A December 2010 Gallup poll found four in 10 Americans are creationists, agreeing with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” Creationism — the belief that all life on Earth came from a divine hand, as described in the Book of Genesis — is a single concept with many subsects. Creationists divide roughly into two camps: “old earth” and “new earth.” Old earth creationists believe, as do scientists, that the earth is millions of years old but, unlike scientists, they hold that it was created by God, while young earth creationists believe — based on their readings of Genesis — the world was created by God between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., which opened in 2007 at a cost of $27 million, teaches young earth creationism, with dioramas featuring men and dinosaurs living side by side, and a baby triceratops for children to ride, Flintstones-style. Introducing the possibility of creationism into biology classes is referred to by supporters as “teaching the controversy.” (Louisiana State University evolutionary biologist Bryan Carstens, who testified at the BESE hearing, disputes that: “The theory of evolution is not controversial among practicing biologists.”) At the final textbook vote in December, Dr. John Oller, a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the texts were decades out of date. Oller, who also sits on the board of the Texas-based Institute for Creation Research, has a website on which he posts his theories about creationism and the textbook controversy, such as, “There is no mention of 4-D moving pictures of unborn babies that explode many myths coming from 19thcentury Darwinism.” When the BESE committee ruled in favor of the teenager’s argument rather than the professor’s, Oller told The Acadiana Gazette afterward, “Darwin’s too-dull tools can’t refute the existence of an intelligent God. It’s entirely presumptuous.”
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