No need to dress up religion as science

Not many people will argue with that. Historians in particular will find the statement uncontroversial.

But 10 years ago in Vicksburg, Miss., I learned an alternate view. Vicksburg was an especially stubborn stronghold of Confederate sentiment during the Civil War - refused to celebrate the Fourth of July again until 1944. Small wonder, then, that a museum there featured an exhibit claiming the Klan was actually formed to save the South from corrupt black governments and that, while "many people suffered, some no doubt innocently," the night riders sought only to "restore some semblance of decency."
The Ku Klux Klan is a terrorist group. It was organized in 1865 for the purpose of controlling and oppressing newly freed slaves through intimidation, violence and murder.

It's a lie, of course, but it's a lie some of us believe. So here's the question: When we teach schoolchildren about the Klan, must we give equal time to this view? Are we required to treat it as if it has the slightest credibility?

Or would that not be an affront to scholarship itself?

It's science, not history, that went on trial this week in Harrisburg, Pa., but the questions still apply. Parents are squaring off in federal court over a local school board's requirement that before children can be taught Charles Darwin's theory that humanity evolved from lower animals, teachers must read a statement acknowledging "alternate" theories of human origin. This would include the so-called theory of intelligent design, which holds that living things are so fantastically complex, they can only have been invented by some supernatural creator.