ACLU Defends Teacher's Right to Promote Racism and Eugenics As Good Science

Well, the title of this post is accurate, but it refers to events that happened 80 years ago.

In light of my last post on fraudulent drawings in modern biology textbooks, and the posts on librarians banning certain books from libraries, I thought I would link back to an earlier related post. In the famously misunderstood Scopes trial, the textbook that Scopes had used was also at issue in the trial. The ACLU was defending John Scopes, but also his right to teach evolution using Hunter's Civic Biology as a textbook. In retrospect, the ACLU was defending the right to teach now discredited pseudoscience that promoted racism and eugenics. Cringe-inducing excerpts from the text of Hunter's Civic Biology can be found here.