But the reticence remained. "He always felt free to speak his mind with us," said Ben Simpson, a friend since kindergarten — but in the public forum, Kopplin clammed.
In February 2008, Andy Kopplin ran in a special election for the state's 6th Congressional District on the Democratic ticket. Zack was set to campaign for his father, looking to speak at the local high school.
Photo courtesy of Andrea Neighbours
Zack Kopplin took an early interest in both the natural and the prehistoric world.
Photo courtesy of Andrea Neighbours
His childhood fascination with dinosaurs and fossils helped spur his current opposition to publicly funded creationism.
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When his turn to talk arrived, Kopplin, then 14, stood mute. His father didn't even qualify for his primary's runoff.
"[Zack] watched himself fail and was devastated when Andy lost," his mother says. "It ate him alive — and it's always been really painful for him, knowing that he didn't have enough courage."
A half-dozen months later, still nursing the guilt, Zack and his father were met by a friend, a member of the editorial staff at the Baton Rouge Advocate, who asked: "You see that Jindal passed the creationism law?"
The creationism law. The one that allowed the teacher — the public-school teacher — to bring creationism, to bring something Kopplin considered so obdurately nonscientific, into the science classroom. Kopplin knew about the law. And he knew the thing would never pass, because this was 2008 and this was the Western world, and, hell, Bobby Jindal's got a biology degree from Brown University. This thing would never pass.
And then it did. And Jindal signed off on it.
Something clicked.
"I have this idea of what's right and what's wrong, and in my mind, I just knew it was wrong," Kopplin recalls. "And it was a really simple thing for me — this is bad, and it needs to be gotten rid of."
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Louisiana's first modern creationist law arose in 1981. The "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Acts" served as an attempt to parry the theory of evolution with alternative notions of the origins of life — namely, those found in the Book of Genesis.
Six years in, the U.S. Supreme Court scuttled the law, holding in Edwards v. Aguillard that the state legislature had maintained a "pre-eminent religious purpose in enacting this statute." (Notably, Justice Antonin Scalia dissented, supporting the putative rationale of "academic freedom.")
While Louisiana was forced to revert to the throes of science, the creationists coalesced. A few years after the ruling, a group called the Discovery Institute came into being. And where earlier creationists had pushed the eponymous theory, the Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, began advocating a new notion they called "intelligent design."
"They couldn't call themselves creationists, so they had to regroup and rebrand creationism as intelligent design," says Dr. Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and one of the leading experts on intelligent design. "They laid low for a few years, developing supporters and donors, but they made no attempts to hide the fact that they were creationists."
Girding their support and plotting their rhetoric, creationists — under the rubric of intelligent design — struck at Kansas textbooks in the mid-2000s, forcing the state to carry a balanced palette of origin science in its textbooks.
"My wife and I were over in France on vacation," says Harry McDonald, the president of Kansas Citizens for Science. "Our guide was talking about anthropology of these cave paintings, and when she heard we were from Kansas, she just went off and kept telling us how backwards these politicians and these people were."
Concurrently, and far less notably, a pair of young-earth creationists cowed the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board into balancing evolution with theories of an intelligent designer. However, much like Louisiana's run two decades earlier, this antiscientific crusade ended up before a judge. And just as before, the doctrine of creationism was struck down.
Pennsylvania returned to a state of normalcy. After a year and a half, Kansas also reverted to its pre-creationist texts. The intelligent designers stood rebuffed again. But that didn't mean they were done.
"These creationists, they never give up, even when they get kicked in the butt," says Forrest, who served as an expert witness in the Dover case. "I knew something was brewing [in Louisiana], but I had no idea of knowing exactly when or where it would hit."
In the end, the legislation came down to one man, elected governor in 2007, whose Ivy League education and Oxford background, many assumed, should have precluded such pandering to a religious base.
Jindal signed the LSEA into law on June 25, 2008, crowing about the academic freedom he and his legislature had just brought to the state. Time and again, he made sure to note that this wasn't about any one religion or any one theory.
And much like Patrick's current wordplay, Jindal's claim was technically correct. There's nothing in the LSEA that mandates the balance attempted in Kansas or Pennsylvania. There's simply a notice that teachers may use "supplemental materials" to help explicate theories that are purportedly controversial, including evolution.
"The law forbids, specifically, by enumeration, anything remotely similar to [the creationism] that is gaining the headlines everywhere," said Gene Mills, president and power broker of the powerful right-wing Louisiana Family Forum. "There's [been] no miscarriage of justice or unreasonable non-disclosure and non-willingness to participate in open dialogue...C'est la vie, man."
