Intelligent design had its day in court in Dover, Pennsylvania, and the result was sadly predictable.  So was the reaction to it.

The evolutionist and atheist left ballyhooed the decision as another victory for science over superstition, and for the separation of Church and state.  The intelligent-design crowd vowed to continue fighting, and talk radio unlimbered its voice.  “Who should get a lump of coal for Christmas?” Sean Hannity’s guest host asked.  “The judge in the case about intelligent design!” answered one irate caller.

Yet no one with any sense, least of all serious Christians, is surprised or even disheartened by the decision, for one simple reason: The atheist left runs the courts and the schools, and sober Christians know they will never change that.  They don’t care what the public schools teach because their children do not attend them.

Intelligent design is the claim that some biological processes and structures are so complex that God, not evolution, must have created them.  The trouble in Dover began when the school board said teachers must read a short statement about intelligent design in the ninth-grade biology class.  The disclaimer said evolution is merely a theory, and that the “theory is not a fact.  Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. . . . Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s.”  The statement goes on from there, but you get the idea.

Using such phrases as “breathtaking inanity,” the judge zapped the school board’s statement with a judicial lightning bolt.  He concluded that the proponents of intelligent design wanted to smuggle religion into the science classroom, a mortal sin against the leftist ideology of public schools.

The upshot was that the proponents of intelligent design put their chips on a vague, four-paragraph statement that said, essentially, nothing.  The statement, the court case—all the hot air was a waste.

The decision was based on the palpably absurd and well-worn notion that teaching something, anything, about religion in a public school is “unconstitutional” and violates the “wall of separation between Church and State.”  Of course, it isn’t the Constitution or the First Amendment that prohibits teaching religion in schools.  The real prohibitive agent in these cases is the steamer trunk of erroneous case law cited by the judge and hoked up by anti-Christian, leftist courts that would have no power if the locals refused to abide them.

It is easy to sympathize with the parents of Dover who favor the teaching of intelligent design.  They are rightly concerned about the anti-Christian gospel that schools pump into the minds of their children.

Yet whatever the merits of intelligent design, it is only the proximate legal reason why the good folks in Dover lost.  Ultimately, they lost because public schools are officially atheist and anti-Christian; and leftist courts, controlled by leftist litigants, lawyers, and judges, will smite anyone promoting any doctrine that threatens their godless creed.

If the courts have one commandment, it is that Christians may not question curricula.  So the court case in Delaware was not really a legal refutation of intelligent design; it was another slap at religion.  Years ago, the cause was prayer at the morning bell.  Now, it’s “abstinence education” and intelligent design.  For the unions and leftist lawyers and judges who run the schools, religion is the enemy.  They fought to extirpate it, and they won.  The battle is over.  Yet even if these regnant powers could be dislodged, what would it matter?  Public schools are uniformly atrocious.  They are blighted educationally and noxious morally.  Repeated surveys show that some teachers are illiterate.  Forget about the honor rolls and kids who graduate with a “4.5.”  Taking control of public schools, particularly given the constant litigation such control would invite, would be a pyrrhic victory.

The evangelicals and supporters of intelligent design must give up this fight and every other one as well, from contraceptives and school prayer to dress codes and homosexuals at the prom.  The only intelligent course is to pull their kids out of the public schools.  Private Christian academies are everywhere.  Parochial schools abound.  Better yet, there is homeschooling.  Indeed, any serious Christian knows that putting a child in public school is a grave sin, given the crippling, lowbrow academics and anti-Christian cultural toxins to which such children are exposed.

Until Christian parents learn that their future lies outside the public schools, they will only strengthen the anti-Christian leftists they want to dethrone.  To defeat them, parents must deprive schools of the malleable minds required to propagate their anti-American, anti-Christian ideology.

That would be an intelligent design.