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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Anyone want to talk about test cases? Rosa Parks' name has come up again to remind us that there is a group of people who didn't know the incident was staged by the NAACP as a way to put segregation on trial. I hope that everyone knows test cases are a thing and I'm a little curious what percentage of the famous judicial cases this would apply to. I guess it tarnishes people's fuzzy feelings about the scrappy individual with pure motives facing off against evil oppression but it doesn't change the facts of the case. Personally I have the impression that the judicial system is skewed against the poor and un-savvy and rewards those who have resources behind them and know how to work the system. So it does seem to the outsider as if everyone could benefit from having an organization behind them to raise attention and mount a strong defense. Rosa Parks may have been one person but her case ended up helping the many not-so-sympathetic individuals who were also victims of the unjust system. So when you hear about a high profile case, does it matter if the person was specifically set up as a test case, and if it matters, why?

I've mixed feelings. To some extent, these are adaptations to outside circumstances: the specific combination of requiring standing while allowing settlement means that just waiting outside of a courthouse for a person leaves too much risk of the clearest violations never percolating up to the appeals level, media has made it more important to have photogenic defendants, and selective enforcement can make finding anyone with standing hard even for cases where people are in wide fear of the law.

On the other hand, it's not hard to notice the places it hasn't adapted. Both areas like death penalty cases where you don't really get to pick your fighter (and, correspondingly, get increasingly reaching characterizations), those where the difficultly of finding a Goldilocks-Just-Right case kicks the can down the road for years or decades, or those where the test case was selected by opponents of the defendant, to undermine the rule of law.

I dunno. I'd rather have a system where rather than standing we had a genuine lawyer-on-lawyer position where a law could be debated from legal principles without someone's freedom or livelihood playing the ante to the case, but I don't know the possible downsides and I do know there's little if any interest for the state to support such a system (outside of a limited free speech and, until last year, abortion exception).

There's the Scopes Monkey Trial, which has passed into pop culture as a brave stand for the cause of Science against craw-thumping ignorance, but which was a test case that both sides wanted. In spite of an admittedly dumb law being passed by a local politician who wanted to virtue signal and gain votes, there were so few Brave Heroes of Science being persecuted for teaching evolution in schools that they had to fix up a test case. The town fathers were happy to be cast as the prosecuting baddies, since Dayton was dying on its feet and they felt that national publicity and notoriety could only do it good. The Brave Heroes had to find a willing guy who wasn't too sure if he had actually ever taught evolution, but he was happy to be the patsy.

So what really was the result there? A victory for teaching science in schools? Not really, Scopes lost the trial but the verdict was overturned. Keeping religion out of schools? Maybe, but I think it was a win that cost too much, since now America seems to have an entrenched battle between creationists and 'I love Science' crowd, where it is possible to have "evolution cannot be taught in school" enforced and textbooks denying it used if the local school district bends to that influence.

So instead of a dumb law being quietly ignored and dying away, the whole thing was given fresh life and the pitched battle between Science and Religion in schools continues to be fought.