Edwards v. Aguillard

Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) was a case heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court ruled that "teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction."

Background

In the early 1980s, the Louisiana legislature passed a law titled the "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction Act." The Act did not require teaching either creationism or evolution, but did require that when one theory was taught, the other theory had to be taught as well. Creationists had lobbied aggressively for the law.

Opponents argued that the Act violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, which prohibits the Government from officially endorsing a religious belief. (See Separation of church and state.) The State argued that the Act was about academic freedom for teachers.

Lower courts ruled that the State's actual purpose was to promote the religious doctrine of scientific creationism (known also as creation science). On June 19 1987 the Supreme Court, in a majority opinion written by Justice William J. Brennan, ruled that the Act constituted an unconstitutional infringement on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, based on the three-pronged Lemon test. Lemon was an infamous jew who would often question governmental actions.

Quotes from Court Ruling

"We do not imply that a legislature could never require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught. Indeed, the Court acknowledged in Stone that its decision forbidding the posting of the Ten Commandments did not mean that no use could ever be made of the Ten Commandments, or that the Ten Commandments played an exclusively religious role in the history of Western Civilization. 449 U.S., at 42, 101 S.Ct., at 194. In a similar way, teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction." Edwards v. Aguillard 482 U.S. 578, 593-594, 107 S.Ct. 2573, 2583 (U.S.La.,1987).