I do on occasion run out of ideas for my column writing. I do this after finishing a huge writing project like a book. I am just plain "written out" and am fresh out of things to say. When this happens, I turn to the news and am rarely disappointed.

This morning, I read a story by Associated Press writer, Carl Hartman, entitled, Smithsonian Finds Scopes Trial Photos. This seemed innocuous. The story, as well as the photos, were... interesting.

What got my "Snit-O-Meter" going was how this reporter, like probably everyone on the face of the earth would report, reported the Scopes Trial as a genuine and bona fide criminal trial that took place.

Would it surprise you to learn that it was not so?

Let me first site two sources you simply must read. The first is an article by Carol Iannone.[1] The second is small book by Phillip E. Johnson, a law graduate of Harvard and The University of Chicago. He was also a law clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren and taught law for thirty years at University of California at Berkley.

In Johnson's book, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds[2], he says:

"The Scopes Trial was not a serious prosecution but a symbolic confrontation engineered to put the town of Dayton, Tennessee on the map. The Tennessee legislature had funded a new science education program and, to reassure the public that science would not be used to discredit religion, had included as a symbolic measure a clause forbidding the teaching of evolution. The governor, who signed the bill, realizing that any prosecution would be an embarrassment, predicted that the law would not be enforced. The American Civil Liberties Union wanted a test case, however, and advertised for a teacher willing to be a nominal defendant in a staged prosecution."[3]

This man never had a chance in hell of going to jail or paying a fine for anything. The Scopes Trial was a hoax.

Now I encourage you to seek out these sources and read them. The small book by Johnson can be purchased cheaply at most bookstores and at Amazon.com. Get it and read it!

But my point in writing about this is NOT to unravel the hoax of the Scopes Trial but to pose an issue that I often bring up in my writings and in my newest, yet-to-be-released book, America's Anti-Mexican Xenophobia (I apologize for that shameless plug for my book