How reforms evolve: creationists push "bill of rights".

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Academic Bill of Rights, David Horowitz - Brief Article

When the conservative firebrand David Horowitz began thumping the tub for his Academic Bill of Rights, which would require professors to respect "a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions," he waged an energetic preemptive campaign against skeptics who worried that creationists, Holocaust deniers, flat earthers, and other fantasists might use such a law as a weapon. A student complaint about evolution instruction "is conceivable," Horowitz claimed in a reason online debate in 2003, "but under the Academic Bill of Rights it would be dismissed."

Maybe not. One of the first important efforts to pass legislation closely modeled on Horowitz's baby was made by a politician specifically opposed to the ascendance of Darwinian theory on campus. "Some professors say, 'Evolution is a fact. And if you don't like it, there's the door,'" says Florida state Rep. Dennis Baxley (R-Ocala). Still bearing the scars of evolutionary teaching he endured in his days as a Florida State student, Baxley last spring introduced a bill that would prevent teachers from punishing...