Here is some of the LA Times article (and more about Intelligent Design “ID” below):
“A lawsuit alleges that the state-owned center improperly bowed to pressure from the Smithsonian Institution, as well as e-mailed complaints from USC professors and others. It contends that the center violated both the 1st Amendment and a contract to rent the museum’s Imax Theater when it canceled the screening of “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.”
The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by the American Freedom Alliance, an L.A.-based group described by senior fellow Avi Davis as a nonprofit, nonpartisan “think tank and activist network promoting Western values and ideals.”
The AFA seeks punitive damages and compensation for financial losses, as well as a declaration from the court that the center violated the Constitution and cannot refuse the group the right to rent its facilities for future events.
The AFA had planned an Oct. 25 screening of two films at the Exposition Park museum — one a short Imax movie called “We are Born of Stars,” which favors Darwin’s theory; the other, “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record,” a feature-length documentary that criticizes Darwin and promotes intelligent design.
Intelligent design is the theory that an intelligent being, rather than impersonal forces such as Darwinian natural selection, is responsible for shaping life on Earth. An overwhelming majority of scientists and science and natural history museums consider the theory of evolution to have been proved beyond a doubt by genetic and fossil evidence. Critics of intelligent design have dismissed it as a superficially scientific cloak for the straightforwardly religious belief known as Creationism that’s anchored in a literal reading of the biblical Book of Genesis….” (More)
For more on this story click here.
Just for the record and the 1 millionth time. Intelligent Design is not Creationsim derived from a literal reading of Genesis…well, I now feel better. (they are separate issues)
If you would like to understand Intelligent Design in plain language, see this book by Sean McDowell and William Dembski:
For understanding how to navigate issues of Science and Faith (as well as interpreting Genesis 1-3 and how all that fits with the age of the earth and Darwinian evolution) look no further than Science and Faith: Friends or Foes by C. John “Jack” Collins. (Hebrew scholar and MIT graduate)