12 December 2005
The Washington Post travels to Cobb County, Georgia, the Atlanta suburb with a remarkable proclivity for passing resolutions, filing lawsuits, and getting sued in the name of religious and social culture war issues du jour. This year, no surprise, it’s anti-Darwin stickers in school textbooks — an addition that’s led to a lawsuit from other Cobb County parents who see the stickers as an entanglement of church and state. Post reporter Peter Whoriskey writes that the twist in this case, if there is one, is in the demographic similarities of the two camps. This time the antagonists aren’t reliably red-state rural versus blue-state urban, but a nice, gray, suburbanite v. suburbanite — a change that might mirror growing political diversity in suburbs, with older suburbs beginning to vote Democratic. But despite such a possible evolution in the makeup of the Darwin debates, the arguments remain, more or less the same: a textbook’s argument for four-legged ancestors being seen as “finding fault with [God’s] design of humans”; an insistance that scientific arguments are, in fact, religious arguments; and then, of course, a petition drive…