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This baby is going to provide hours of fun!

That would be the Institute for Creation Research's lawsuit ... that can only be described as possessing all the cogency and forceful logic of the ICR's science.

If you want a serious treatment of the suit, you might want to go to Tony Whitson's curricublog for some links, not least of them Steven Schafersman's, where you can read the decision in all its overblown rhetorical glory. (If you are particularly nice to me and would like a pdf copy that has been OCRed, I can email you one.)

Not myself being the poor sod who is the law secretary to the Federal judge unlucky enough to be assigned this case (sure to draw even more loonies out of the creationist woodwork than did Dover), I don't have to try to wrap my brain around the intellectual pretzels this complaint has tried to make out of the law. This much I'll say: the thrust so far as I've gotten seems to be that, as long as any private school is not merely a diploma mill, the state has no right to control whatever standard the school chooses to award degrees or what it calls them. For example (p. 18):

ICRGS, which conspicuously affirms its Biblical creationist viewpoint as an institutional distinctive, should not be required to academically "shut its mouth" or "go to the back of the [postsecondary science education] bus" just because it affirms the truth of Genesis 1:1, or because ICRGS corroborates the Biblical account of the Genesis Flood (the historicity of which has been repeatedly corroborated).

And on page 23:

[D]efendants have no constitutional right to hinder ICRGS's academic freedom to offer, educate for, educationally assess, and/or grant master's and doctor's degrees (so long as such is done in good faith, and not as a "diploma mill" "sham") ...

In other words, they can teach religion, call it science and award a science degree, all in the great American tradition of caveat emptor, and there is nothing the state or its education department can do about it. I await with bated breath the masters degrees in astrology and UFOlogy.

But there is much mirth to be had in the meantime. For example, I bet you didn't know that molecular and cellular biology are nothing more serious than the hula hoop or pet rocks:

Legally relevant, to ICRGS's institutional academic freedom, is another theme recurring in Dr. Skoog's criticisms of ICRGS's M.S, curriculum, science fads. The necessarily implied criticism is that ICRGS doesn't try to be "fashionable" by mimicking whatever its evolutionist counterparts are now doing, thematically speaking. For example, Dr. Skoog remarks: "The anatomy of these organisms ["'the jawless, cartilaginous, and bony fishes, amphibians (mudpuppy & frog), reptiles (turtle), birds (pigeon), mammals (fetal pig and rat), humans and other unusual mammals"] has traditionally been emphasized in high school and introductory college biology courses. However, this emphasis has been decreasing dramatically in recent decades as emphasis is placed on molecular and cellular biology." In other words, ICRGS's curriculum is faulted, in Skoog's opinion, if ICRGS continues to scientifically investigate and analyze Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy, because "the (evolutionary) Joneses" are not wearing that fashion much nowadays. (p. 19)

And what a shame it is that medicine ever decided to move beyond bleeding it patients.

But this has to be my very favorite legal footnote ever:

²¹ As a point of clarification, THECB Commissioner Paredes' unquestioned faith in a "Big Bang" of "14 billion years ago" (which he may believe in by faith, but he bas no eye-witness knowledge of such) should not be confused with the "great noise" mentioned in 2^nd Peter 3:10. The evolution-only viewpoint discrimination is further illustrated in Commissioner Paredes' opinion (on 4-23-2008) that evolutionary thinking as "foundational" to "modern science". (p. 21)

The ICR has been losing out of late to Answers in Genesis in the "bring the crazy" sweepstakes. It's surged right back into the lead.
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