Of course, for anyone remotely familiar with Louisiana, this law was precisely about the allowance of creationism into the classroom. "Everybody knows exactly what this bill is," Forrest muses.
The fiscal impact's already run through the state. The Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology, one of the most notable national scientific organizations, planted a conference boycott on Louisiana. Dr. Kevin Carman, then dean of the College of Science at Louisiana State University, noted that multiple faculty cited the LSEA in either their reasons for departure or their rationale for not moving to Louisiana.
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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"It's a very cleverly worded act...and it's manifested itself in our ability to hire or retain faculty," says Carman, now the executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada, Reno. "It's been quite disturbing to highly educated young people...You don't end up attracting the kind of talent you need to have a knowledge-based economy."
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During his senior year of high school, Kopplin was allowed a choice of senior project, something to distract him from college applications and SAT studies. His classmates chose musical pursuits, cooking lessons and learning new languages. Kopplin chose to push for repeal of the LSEA.
Contacting Forrest — who first vetted the boy to be sure he wasn't a plant from the Louisiana Family Forum — Kopplin learned from the earliest moments that his project was likely going to fail. "Other than Tennessee's 1967 repeal, I don't know of a single creationist law that's actually ever been repealed," says Forrest. "Besides, in Louisiana, Jindal has a lock on the Legislature."
Kopplin pinpointed a state legislator, Representative Karen Carter Peterson — one of only three in the House to vote against the bill — who he believed could help.
Forrest then put Kopplin in contact with Dr. Harry Kroto, a chemistry professor at Florida State University and a former Nobel recipient, to ask for aid. "I thought it was extremely heartening that a young man like this would take on such a task," Kroto said. "I haven't come across that before...People think that an attack on evolution is an attack on Darwin, but it's actually an attack on the whole scientific community."
Kopplin convinced Kroto to contact his fellow Nobel laureates and soon began compiling their endorsements and signatures in opposition to the LSEA. The list, which Kopplin still maintains, currently contains 78 Nobel winners backing his cause.
In the meantime, Kopplin's fight continued. In one of the few moments of levity in the first textbook hearing, a Presbyterian minister Kopplin had asked to attend said, "I should not be here to tell you you shouldn't be putting creationism in the schools. But this is Louisiana, so I have to be here and say: What they want is religion, and it should not be in the schools."
Despite the creationist students bused in to the board hearings, the board voted 8-4 to defer a decision on the books. One month later, it voted 6-1 to purchase texts without the imprimatur of creationism. Two days later, they concluded their voting, cementing their decision to purchase the textbooks.
The anti-creationists had won.
It was rear-guard, sure — "supplemental materials" were still allowed in the classroom — but as Kopplin said at the time, it was "the largest victory for science that Louisiana has had in eight years."
Still, as Forrest had warned, the LSEA was a different entity entirely. While Kopplin began lobbying on its behalf — publishing his creationist research, gathering the laureates, shuttling between television interviews and writings on Dawkins's Web site — Peterson presented her repeal bill. It was supported by the City of New Orleans. It was supported by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Biological Sciences and the American Society for Cell Biology.
It didn't even make it out of committee.
(One of the numerous viral videos surrounding the LSEA hearing shows state Senator Julie Quinn, upon being presented with the list of Nobel laureates, saying that she'd grown "tired of seeing little letters behind everyone's names.")
The problem, as both sides seem to acknowledge, is a simple one: Despite the fact that the LSEA's been on the books since 2008, not a single complaint or lawsuit has been brought by anti-creationists. That's not to say that creationist education hasn't taken place; rather, none has yet been brought to public light.
"In other words, Zack and the boys are on a hunt with a political solution to a problem that just doesn't exist," Mills, the LFF president, said. "There's gotta be a different agenda at work here."
In early 2012, Kopplin, as a freshman at Rice, and Peterson, now a state senator, attempted the same tactic. A repeal bill was filed once more. Just as before, it failed to make it out of committee.
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But the public has taken notice. Between award ceremonies at the Playboy Mansion and national interviews — all while dodging derogatory postings from the head of Kentucky's Creation Museum — Kopplin has fast become the face of the anti-creationist movement.
"It's hard to be very optimistic...but when I look for reasons to be optimistic, it's people like Zack," says Dr. Neal Lane, the former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and now a fellow with Rice University's Baker Institute. "These people who believe in a young earth...they don't see inconsistencies with their belief. And they're really in the way of democracy."
