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Living Witness(28)

By:Jane Haddam


“Does she belong to, what did you call it, the American Humanist Association?” Gregor asked.

“I don’t know,” Gary said. “But I’d be surprised if she agreed to belong to anything Henry Wackford was running. Anyway, Franklin had asked this guy named Holman Carr to run, and Holman didn’t make it. Holman goes to our church. The Baptist Church. So does Alice McGuffie. Everybody Franklin asked goes to our church. I should have realized something was up. Especially since Holman—let’s just say Holman isn’t the kind of guy you’d expect to be on a school board.”

“Wouldn’t expect, how?” Gregor asked.

“Wouldn’t expect because he’s barely got a high school education,” Gary said, “and he isn’t exactly a self-taught genius. Come to think of it now, that’s true about Alice, too. But it didn’t occur to me. I thought it was a good idea, getting the old board out. I still think it was a good idea. It was just that Franklin had an agenda he didn’t apprise me of.”

“And that agenda was?” Gregor asked. He noticed that John Jackman had suddenly started to stare at the ceiling. Gary Albright was looking down at his hands.

“He wanted to change the science curriculum to teach Creation Science as well as evolution in biology classes. Starting with what I’d guess you’d call middle-school science.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“You’ve got to understand,” Gary said, “I think the idea of teaching Creation is just fine. More than fine. I don’t think Darwin’s theory has a leg to stand on, logically or scientifically. And the real problem is the way it’s used, used to convince people that there’s no such thing as morality. So, you know, if Franklin had broached the idea to me, I wouldn’t have been against it. Necessarily.”

“Necessarily?” Gregor asked.

“Yes, well,” Gary said. “I’m studying nights, you know. I’m thinking I’d like to be a lawyer, so I’m doing courses to get me into law school. It’s not very interesting, being on the police force when I can’t get around in the field. I had a course in Constitutional law last fall that covered a lot of the cases having to do with evolution and Creation in public schools. I knew as soon as I heard Franklin’s proposal that we were going to get sued, and we were going to lose.”

“So you opposed it?” Gregor asked.

“I opposed the original proposition,” Gary said, “but later Franklin scaled it down some, and we decided that what we’d ask for was a disclaimer in all the biology books, saying that Darwin’s theory was just a theory, and not a fact, and that any student who wanted to investigate a different view could go to the school libraries and take out this book, Of Pandas and People, that told about Intelligent Design. There hasn’t been a case yet about intelligent design.”

“I’d never even heard of it,” John Jackman said.

“It relies on the fact that some biological structures are irreducibly complex,” Gary said. “That means that they work the way they are, but if any part of them is missing they don’t work at all. So they couldn’t have evolved in little steps, you know, because none of the steps would have made any difference in their ability to reproduce. That’s what Darwin’s theory says. That traits get passed down because they make the animal more likely to reproduce.”

“I think it’s a little more complicated than that,” Gregor said.

“There hasn’t been a case about Intelligent Design, as far as I know,” Gary repeated. “I tried looking it up. And I went along with that proposal, because I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought we had a good chance of getting a general agreement, because the whole thing was completely noncoercive. Nobody had to learn about intelligent design unless they wanted to, or their parents wanted them to. The idea was to get the whole board to vote for the policy unanimously. But that didn’t work out, because of Annie-Vic.”

“She voted against the policy,” Gregor said. “All right, from what I’ve heard about her, that makes sense.”

“She didn’t just vote against it,” Gary said, “she joined the lawsuit against it, which started up less than a month later. Henry Wackford brought it, with a bunch of people—”

“Wait,” Gregor said. “Henry Wackford. That’s the man who was the old chairman of the school board? The one who was displaced by Franklin Hale.”

“That’s right,” Gary said. “And I do think that there’s more than a little revenge going on here. He’s a lawyer, anyway. He filed suit with a bunch of different co-plaintiffs, Annie-Vic, some of the parents from the development. That’s where most of the new people live. In the development. And Franklin, you know, was furious. But mostly he was furious about Annie-Vic, because she was breaking ranks.”