NCSE is pleased to announce that the text of William J. Bennetta's "The Rise and Fall of the Louisiana Creationist Law" — a two-part article that appeared in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's magazine Terra in 1988 — is now available on NCSE's website, courtesy of the author and the museum.
Writing in the wake of the decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, Bennetta was prophetic about the next developments: "the creationists' new pseudoscience will carry a new name ... Its content will be fully sterilized: it will avoid explicit supernaturalism, and it will speak not of any god but of a nebulous 'intelligence' or 'intelligent cause.'"
A biologist and fellow of the California Academy of Science, Bennetta was the president of The Textbook League — a non-profit organization that scrutinized textbooks for errors of fact, especially including what Bennetta habitually described as "creationist claptrap" — and the editor of its publication The Textbook Letter.