Peter Irons' ironic rebuttal of the Discovery Institute

Judge Jones shamelessly accepting 2006 Dickinson College honorary degree for his ghostwritten Kitzmiller v. Dover opinion

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Peter Irons' ironic rebuttal of the Discovery Institute said,

The DI authors deny making any ad hominem attacks on Judge Jones. My article cited several examples of such attacks, to which readers may refer. I will note here only one, John West's charge that Judge Jones suffered from "delusions of grandeur." This term, in fact, is not part of the legal lexicon, but refers to a psychiatric disorder. Whether used carelessly or intentionally, this characterization of Judge Jones certainly meets the ad hominem criterion, in my opinion.

I agree that the DI made ad hominem attacks on Jones, but this was not one of them. "Ad hominem" means "to the man" or "to the person," meaning that a criticism just attacks a person's character rather than addressing the issues. However, accusing Judge Jones of having "delusions of grandeur" does address one of the issues: his megalomaniacal hope that his rulings on the ID-as-science question would settle this question for all courts in the USA. Judge Jones wrote in the Dover opinion,
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. . .we will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us.

I really like the Merriam-Webster online dictionary's definition of megalomania: "a delusional mental disorder that is marked by infantile feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur." LOL

Irons also wrote,

In their initial responses to the Kitzmiller ruling, the DI authors dismissed Judge Jones's opinion as of "minor significance," predicting that it "will recede as an interesting footnote to the history of the scientific and cultural debate" over evolution and intelligent design. Why, then, have they devoted dozens of blog posts, a book, and a law review article to denigrating that opinion and its author?

The Kitzmiller opinion is of "minor significance" and " 'will recede as an interesting footnote to the history of the scientific and cultural debate' over evolution and intelligent design" precisely because the opponents of the decision have devoted dozens of blog posts, a book, and law review articles to denigrating that opinion and its author! If the opponents of the decision had just rolled over and played dead, the Kitzmiller opinion would have been accepted. Public interest in the case has fizzled. The Amazon.com website for "Monkey Girl," a highly touted book that is principally about the case, has received only 29 customer reviews in over four months -- a really popular book would have received hundreds of customer reviews by now. Judge Jones, who was listed last year in Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world and was in Wired magazine's list of "the ten sexiest geeks of 2005," has returned to the obscurity from whence he came.
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