My hubby and I actually had a discussion about the religious strife in the US and it's possible origins.

Church and state used to be the same thing. The church is used to be the taxation center, the place where the less fortunate of society looked to to get help, the center or law, and most importantly, the center of learning. That's how they grew their populations of followers beyond the the few gullible enough to join their cult.

Now, government has taken over all of those functions, and churches can only gather the few that are susceptible to their brain washing methods, and the traditional followers are leaving in droves because science is much better at describing the world around us. The churches are getting desperate, and trying to recruit through the means that they used to, but there's this "separation of church and state" thing getting in the way. So, they frantically claw at the barrier, and try to break it down by whatever means necessary. I think that they do realize that their intentions would trample on the rights of millions and possibly bring us back into a dark age of religious wars, but they think that it would be a good thing.

This case shows that they are going to lose. Our system was built to protect the rights of its citizens. They cannot overturn that without completely destroying the system, and most of them are unwilling to destroy the system that protects them. They will fail.

It makes me feel slightly ill that science teachers had to BEG to be allowed to teach science in the classrooms.

Things they have vast proof for are thrown aside in favour of a book of fairy tales thousands of years old.

No, the bible is NOT 2000 years old. It was writen over a period of 1800 years by more than 40 people, we're not always sure who wrote what, and before that it was passed along orally before it was even canonised. It's one thing to teach it in a class of Religious Education as a load of morally based metaphors. It could even be taught as a sign of evolution of culture. It's totally another to put it as mandatory teaching in Science classes as fact.