If it’s up to the ACLU there will be, sort of. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has a law on his desk that is dredging up memories of a trial long ago in the state that fined a teacher for teaching evolution. The law seems harmless enough.

The bill, which passed with large margins through Tennessee’s Republican-dominated House and Senate, would allow teachers to question “the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of theories “including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning,” according to its text. It would also block administrators from preventing teachers from raising questions about these subjects.

This is fascinating and sad at the same time. The final decades of the twentieth century brought us to a time where something called scientific “consensus” was supposed to erase all doubt and questioning of certain theories. Those who questioned such theories were and are labeled anti-science, deniers, and other such terms of endearment. When evolution is the theory questioned, the “consensus” accuses the questioners of trying to sneak religion into a public sphere, as of course these defenders of “consensus” are doing in Tennessee:

Opponents, including science organizations, teacher groups and the ACLU, argue the law injects religion into public education and raises the specter of the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” of 1925, when a high-school science teacher in Tennessee was convicted of teaching evolution.

Forget, for the moment, about whether a thoroughly secularized public arena scrubbed completely of any religions influence is in fact this is what the nation’s Founders intended. Just consider this: Why would questioning evolution or global warming require a religious motivation? There are plenty of secular scientists who question the mechanisms of the Darwinian consensus. Why are they not accused of trying to sneak religion into the conversation? Yes, that is a rhetorical question.

I’m religious, but my doubt about Darwinian evolution starts from the inability in any way to prove its stated mechanisms—natural selection and random mutation. The idea of macro-evolution depends on these, and in the world of the scientific “consensus” about evolution these ideas are assumed, never proven, because they can’t be proven. The fundamental issue is whether these mechanisms can create a new species out of another, not whether there are changes within species, or micro-evolution. (No one doubts the latter.) When we can see, when we can actually test scientifically, that random mutation and natural selection produce a species that didn’t exist before, I’m all in.  But in fact, Darwinian macro-evolution is unfalsifiable and thus doesn’t qualify as science at all, according to scientists’ own definition.

My skepticism about Darwinian evolution, moreover, has nothing to do with the philosophical interpretation of evolution threatening my Christian faith. There are many Christians who do not believe in a literal reading of the Genesis creation account through twenty-first century eyes determined by twenty-first century assumptions. I read a book recently that was completely plausible to me that made just this argument, “The Lost World of Genesis One.”

The reason I bring this up is as an indictment of the modern left. The tactic these people always use—and this goes for our current president, as he displayed so adroitly this week, and practically everyone in the political party he belongs to—is to condemn their opponents’ motives, usually without engaging their reasoning or facts in any meaningful way. It’s not just that the other side is wrong, they typically aver; it’s that they actually want to kill people, enslave people, or harm people in some other way. For the modern left there are no unintended consequences, thus categorically dismissing an important argument the right tries to use against the policies and ideas of the left. Most on the right grant those on the other side grand intentions, but there’s no such luck for those on the wrong side of the left.

Thus  the current case is characterized as a matter of religious fanatics trying to breach the so-called wall of separation between church and state. In the mid-1990s, it was the Republicans wanting to starve children because they wanted to cut the rate of growth of some government welfare program—not actual cuts, mind you. And the examples could go on ad infinitum. Make a list. It will keep you occupied for a very long time.