U.S. teacher broke law by calling creationism "superstitious nonsense"

More delights from south of the border:

A US teenager has successfully won a lawsuit against a teacher who described creationism as "superstitious nonsense".

Chad Farnan, a devout Christian studying at California's Capistrano Valley high school, persuaded a judge that his European history teacher, James Corbett, violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which courts interpret as banning government employees from promoting, or displaying hostility towards, religion.

From the Guardian, via Unionist in this babble thread. Maybe the teacher was being unnecessarily rude, but you have to wonder what kind of chilling effect this ruling might have on other teachers. To be fair, the judge dismissed a lot of the complaints, and only the aforementioned comment was deemed to cross the line, but still...

Indeed, American culture seems to be getting more and more anti-intellectual as time passes. Here's a nice piece by Heather Mallick on the subject, in which she discusses Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason:

On September 11, 2001, New York author and historian Susan Jacoby headed home, not unreasonably stopping at a bar first, where she overheard a conversation between two men in suits:

"It's just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.

"What's Pearl Harbor?" the other one asked.

"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbour, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man replied.

Yikes. And it's getting worse, not better.