"Intelligent Design Isn't" is one of our best sellers and I wish I could say I coined the phrase, but I'm sure thousands have uttered the quip before me. Months after designing the shirt I came across a New Yorker article by H. Allen Orr entitled nearly that, "Why Intelligent Design Isn't."My mother loved our themes, but not this one. She told me that she felt the one which smugly states "Intelligent Design is Stupid" implied that I felt God was stupid. I bit my tongue lest I inform this woman who brought me into a very Catholic world that I had little time for gods. I simply stated that those who were trying to get the theory of Intelligent Design taught in schools were scientific dolts grasping at straws to bring God into the public classrooms of America.
While we high five each other as school boards, starting with Dover, are struck down in their attempts to meddle with local curricula, hundreds of other cases are brought monthly, virtually strangling science education in America. My sister's best friend is a science teacher in my hometown. In a public school. She is forbidden to teach evolution. If you think we're winning this particular battle, guess again.
As if by divine intervention, the first woman to buy this shirt was none other than Jennifer Miller, the Dover, Pennsylvania middle school science teacher at the center of the maelstrom. Look for her in the forthcoming book "Into the Great Divide" by Matthew Chapman, great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The book expounds on his excellent Harper's cover story, "God or Gorilla?".
Jennifer has also volunteered the services of her fellow science teachers to proudly sport our attire at various science education functions. I've promised her a whole wardrobe of ID related themes and now that we're expanding our women's lines its time to deliver on that. And document it, of course.
We want to get out on the streets of Philadelphia and shoot people in crowds, but I also want to take advantage of what our messages mean in the context of the history of this burg I call home. Ben Franklin's Grave. Independence and Carpenters Halls. The Liberty Bell. All great locations until the Boy Scouts with Guns, aka the Federal Marshals who comprise a virtual army in an entire quadrant of this city, chase us out or worse, arrest us.
Just as people in Anaheim yawn over having Disneyland in their backyard, Philadelphians are often guilty of treating this nation's birthplace with an equal smirk, cursing at the tourists we trip over daily, never visiting these treasures unless we have family in from out of town.
Living smack dab in the middle of history central for five years gave me a rare appreciation. Walking my dog day and night through the various parks and buildings spread over acres of Center City forced me to think daily about these amazing, crazy men who started this American Experiment. They were the most radical of souls, and they're all spinning in their graves as the theocrats steer us back to the middle ages. Every American needs a kick in the ass tour cum Constitutional seminar of this city, replete with in-your-face quotations of the founding fathers' fervent disdain for religion and the religious.
Want a nation under God? Go visit, or better yet, move to Iran. Afghanistan. Iraq. Listen to an NPR story about three grocers in Baghdad killed and their store firebombed for displays of fruit deemed overly sexual. "Standing up a celery stalk near a couple of tomatoes in a way that might – to the profoundly repressed – suggest an aroused male, is now a capital offense.”
In the meantime we're raising a generation of children who shall, through the narrow mindedness of blind faith, become the least educated scientifically in the industrialized world. There's a war on science. This message fights back.
