Thursday's Dover Panda Trial Commentary

And you could say the law center has an interest in creating more Christians of the stripe that will need defending, legalwise. I guess that’s the promotion part.

And I’m glad to report that, judging from Day Seven of the Dover Panda Trial, it’s working.

About the time that Richard Thompson, head law guy at the Thomas More center and chief defender of the Dover Area School Board, started his third year of cross-examination of philosopher Barbara Forrest, it was easy to imagine that at that moment, everyone in the courtroom, including Forrest, who doesn’t believe in God, was violating the separation of church and court by appealing to God for it to please, Lord, just stop.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if there was a point to the ceaseless stream of questions from Thompson designed to elicit Lord knows what. He’d ask her the same question 18 different times, expecting, I guess, a different answer at some point. And he never got it.

Thompson, who said he’s a former prosecutor, should have known better. Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and expert on the history of the intelligent design creationist movement, was a lot smarter than, say, some poor, dumb criminal defendant.

Here is a summation of Forrest’s testimony: She examined the history of the intelligent design movement and concluded that it’s simply another name for creationism. And what led her to that conclusion? The movement leader’s own words. They started out with a religious proposition and sought to clothe it in science. The result was similar to putting a suit on your dog. (Not that I’d know what that looks like.)

That, and when some of its founders wrote "Of Pandas and People," they took an earlier text and merely replaced the word "creationism" with the phrase "intelligent design."

Thompson attacked her. He leapt to action, using every weapon at his disposal, and asked her about some guy losing his car keys.

Seriously.

At one point in his cross-examination — did I mention it went on for 4½ years? — he asked Forrest whether she had ever heard about a case in which the editor of a scientific journal who published an article by a proponent of intelligent design creationism was retaliated against for doing so.

And what form did that retaliation take?

"Loss of car keys," among other things, Thompson said.

And, again, seriously, the loss of this guy’s car keys turned into a federal case. Thompson told Forrest the federal government investigated and learned something or other — I’m not sure what because I was wondering whether the guy ever did find his keys. Thompson never said.

At another point, Thompson asked Forrest whether she’d ever heard of Gregor Mendel.

"The monk!" Forrest said.

Yes, the monk.

The monkey can’t be far behind. There’s been a lot of talk about pandas so far, but little talk about monkeys. Monkeys need to get a better PR person.

Speaking of animals, you had to know that talk of bestiality wasn’t far off.

Thompson was in the midst of asking Forrest whether she had heard a bunch of things that some people had said to indicate, well, to indicate whether she’d heard a bunch of things that some people had said, I guess, when the topic came up.

Thompson asked whether she had ever heard a statement by some guy — frankly, this one caught me off-guard and I didn’t catch the guy’s name — who said that belief in evolution can be used to justify "cross-species sex."

This came on the same day that Thompson grilled Forrest about her opposition to the so-called Santorum amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act that seemed to encourage, sort of, the teaching of intelligent design. Our U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum is a friend of the intelligent design people.

He also has a strange obsession with bestiality, commenting that court decisions that uphold the right to privacy would lead to — naturally, and you know you were thinking it — man-on-dog sex.

This pointless cross-examination went on for, oh, I don’t know, eight, nine years, when the judge, ruling on an objection to some question or other — I think Thompson was trying to ask Forrest whether her favorite color is green — said he’d give Thompson latitude in his questioning, adding, "but I will let you know, this is not helping me."

So even the judge believed it was pointless.

It ended, oh, after about a decade and a half, when, finally, the judge suggested that the plaintiffs’ attorneys offer an objection to cut it off because the questioning had gone far afield and had sent out such powerful boredom rays that people were falling asleep listening to it in Idaho.

I think it was at about the point where Thompson was asking her what she thought of the Red Sox’s chances to come back from being two games down in the playoffs.