USG: "My opinion is that Kitzmiller did the ID community a great service"
JMS: id say it was a disservice. because of absurd comparisons to science, impressionable minds are going to be confused about which is which.
USG: I think kids can cope with a great deal more than we give them credit for. But setting that bias aside, I was asked by a friend of mine, at dinner, why am I even spending my time discussing this issue with people. Who cares? Teach them to read, write, and “rithmatic” and they can figure out all that other stuff by themselves or from their parents. I started to argue, but I couldn’t fire off a reply quick enough before we started in the virtues of the New England clam chowder.
I guess it’s up to us to keep origins in the forefront of people’s minds. My fear is, that it will be kept alive with the same kind of energy people are trying to preserve ball room dancing and tempera painting. Some say “It’s not that we would die if we didn’t know where it all came from.”
JMS: science deals in observation and testing, it welcomes scrutiny to further test and validate theories. creationism, in this case, provides no answer, it only poses a question. with creationism, when you attempt to poke a whole in evolutionary theory, youre not presenting an opposing theory, youre only challenging its validity. thats where the confusion happens. people who advocate teaching creationism and evolution side by side obviously dont understand how science works.
USG: I like how you crafted this statement. I would much rather have my child know the truth of thermodynamics than the mystery of quantum singularities. Guys spend their entire lives discovering an element, just to get their name on the periodic table, and then tragically realize that their kids don’t even care.

So on the grand scale of things, does this issue matter to people? Maybe to a few. But most want to know how we are going to lower gas prices. When gas is back down to $0.95 a gallon, we might have time to pick this up again.
I think this issue is gravely important. Because man isn’t a finite thing - after he dies, he returns to the dust and no longer continues is not the way the story ends. In order to believe that God is who he says he is, we have to believe his writings. In order to believe his writings, we have to make this a relevant discussion for the sake of people’s eternal future. Kitzmiller is important, because it keeps the debate of who God is and what he’s all about, alive.
We can argue about the absurdity of all kinds of notions about life and death and God. But to deny our children access to life’s ultimate questions, is a disservice.

As for the intellectual honesty question: In order to give expert testimony in a court of law, it is the burden of the proponent of that testimony to say to the court that whatever comes out of that person's mouth is evidence, based on a high value of credibility. A presumptive credibility. In order for a scientist to be given that credibility in a court of law, one of the standards which can be held under scrutiny of the court is whether or not what the science guy is saying is "peer reviewed". More weight is given to the opionion being proffered, the more extensive the peer review is. Dover school board lost because their experts were giving testamony that wasn't extensively peer reviewed in scientific journals, as was Kitzmiller's experts. And they came out of the wood work to testify to that fact, during trial.

Dover's lawyers should have known this was going to come into play when they introduced their experts. They didn't, and their evidence was surpressed. The downlow is that Kitzmiller had more empiracle data than the Dover school board did. My question is, was this fair?

__________________
"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." March 4, 1869, Grant's First Inaugural Address