The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.
John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, 1874
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustlings or in the church. And the next session you can ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.
Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
Clarence Darrow, July 13, 1925
Rhea County Corthouse, Dayton, Tennessee, July 21, 1925
In the King James Bible, Proverbs 11:29a reads: 'He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind'.
This ancient phrase aptly summarizes the modern drama of the Second American Civil War, or the War of Bible Belt Secession, of 1925-26.
For the second time in a century, the South troubled the common house of these United States, rose in rebellion and inherited the wind. The post-war South would be changed beyond recognition...
...but the way the Second Fall of the South happened, now that is something that no one could have possibly predicted, for there was nothing in the voluminous annals of American history to suggest the possibility of such an extraordinary outcome...
Regarding the events that immediately preceded the fall of the Neo-Confederacy, none was more emblematic, none more memorable than the Scopes Trial.
...
It was a torrid Tuesday afternoon of July 1925.
The courtroom was packed, which only contributed to the scorching heat of the day.
To enter the courthouse, everyone had to walk under a banner which read in bold, large letters "READ YOUR BIBLE".
Judge John T. Raulston sat at his desk, gavel in hand; on either side stood the flag of Tennessee and the Neo-Confederate flag.
The defendant, who had inadvertently started a modern holy war in the tranquil rural town of Dayton, was a spectacled, unassuming, ordinary young man, age 24, by the name of John Thomas Scopes. He was a football coach and substitute biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School; after the secessionist state of Tennessee had passed the Butler Act in March, Scopes was betrayed and denounced by one of his students for the crime of teaching the chapter on evolution in the State-approved biology textbook titled Civic Biology: Presented in Problems.
He was promptly thrown in jail. Now he was in shackles- like a dangerous, violent criminal- guarded by faceless ghastly figures clad in white, like Heavenly spectres that only awaited their master's command to drag his soul to Hell...
Armed Klansmen. Both within and outside the courthouse, they provided the security for the occasion.
For it was indeed a high-profile trial; no less a personality than William Jennings Bryan himself, the famed Southern Democrat and foremost theologian of the Neo-Confederacy, had volunteered to lead the prosecution. He was a physically imposing man, in his mid-sixties, his bald head shining as he lead his new crusade, with modern white-clad Knights Templar by his side...
Over the course of the trial, he thundered for hours on end with the frail but still eloquent voice of the greatest American orator of his generation...
"...This is a wicked attack on the Southern way of life by the godless cities of the North! These evolutionists, this fifth column of the Union, are brewers of poison- but they would not be content with poisoning the human body like ordinary war criminals, no, their malevolence is way too subtle for that... They set out to poison the mind instead, and the minds of innocent children no less...
...Let the great state of Tennessee be a shining beacon for all the South, an example of how godly men treat these peddlers of Darwin's poison..."
Bryan's opponent only prepared a token defense, and a paultry excuse for one at that. He tried to insist that the Butler Act was unconstitutional, infringing on both academic freedom and freedom of speech. Judge Raulston shot him down, affirming that the purpose of the court was not to discuss the merits of a law that was already on the books, only to ascertain whether or not the statute had been violated.
Having heard the testimonies of the students, the court then examined the content of the offending chapter in the biology textbook, Exhibit 1 of the case. At one point, Bryan brought the very last paragraph to the attention of the court...
"Your honor, in this whole blasphemous chapter there is but one fine and holy truth; one that the great state of Tennessee rightly recognizes..."
...he started reding from page 196, last paragraph, titled The Races of Man...
At the present time there exist upon the Earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure.
These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
"AMEN!"
The Klansmen roared in approval.
The spectators cheered.
It was no wonder that Bryan and the KKK went along so well; for he had been Secretary of State under the Klan's favourite President, Woodrow Wilson...
...
On the last day of the trial, Bryan read the prosecution's closing statement- another hour long effusion of theological crap...
At last, the jury left to deliberate- barely even a formality since the verdict was known from the start; the twelve jurors were all fundamentalists, none of them knew the first thing about Darwinian evolution, and one was illiterate.
"Mr. Foreman," Judge Raulston asked the jury, "are you ready to tell us whether you have agreed on a verdict?"
"Yes, sir, we have, your honor."
"What do you find?"
"We have found the defendant guilty."
The Judge turned to face Scopes...
"Mr. Scopes, will you come around here, please, sir."
Scopes, who had been silent throughout the whole ordeal, still in shackles and flanked by armed guards, rose to his feet and presented himself before the court...
"Mr. Scopes, the jury has found you guilty under this indictment, charging you with having thaught in the schools of Rhea county, in violation of the Butler Act, which makes it unlawful for anyone to teach any theory that denies the story of the Authority's creation of Man, and teach instead thereof the Satanic doctrine that Man has descended from a lower order of animals."
He paused, perhaps briefly overcome by emotion, knowing it would be the most important sentence in his entire career...
"Have you anything to say, Mr. Scopes, as to why the court should not impose punishment upon you?"
Scopes, at long last, spoke, giving voice to a silent defiance that had grown with every passing day of that sickening travesty of justice...
"Your honour, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. In the end, what justice could I expect to receive from a court of traitors, who have sold their country to Russia and the human race to the Authority?"
The courtroom erupted in sheer outrage.
The Klansmen immediately pointed their weapons at Scopes.
Bryan thundered, "HE HAS SPOKEN BLASPHEMY! WHAT MORE EVIDENCE DO WE NEED?" (Matthew 26:65)
"ORDER! ORDER!"
Raulston's gavel boomed and the spectators, seething, returned to something resembling calm...
"Mr. Scopes," Judge Raulston said, now clearly pissed, "since you have been found guilty of teaching the Satanic doctrine of Evolution, I hereby sentence you to DEATH BY HANGING!"
Instantly, one of the windows shattered.
The short, red, spiky creature that had jumped through it landed on the witness stand...
...holding a rifle!
"OBJECTION!"
Judge Raulston's head exploded.
Moxxie, Millie and Loona appeared behind Blitz.
All Hell broke loose.
The crowd of moronic bigots started running away screaming, as if all the armies of Satan had showed up!
Loona went straight for Scopes. A terrified Klansman guard stood in her way, trying to shoot her...
She quickly grabbed his rifle, snapped it in half with her bare hands and stabbed him with it.
Seeing the fountain of blood gurgling from the man's open throat, Scopes immediately fainted for the shock.
Loona grabbed Scopes and put him on her shoulder, like a bag.
"We have the package! Let's get the fuck out of here!"
"You must be joking, Loona!" Millie said, cutting a Klansman in half with her gigantic battle-axe, "We literally just got in here!"
"URRRGGHH!"
A frustrated Loona punched a nearby Klansman, sending him flying through a window...
...She glared at the rest, her blood-red eyes burning with lupine rage...
"I'll fucking SHOW YOU WHO'S THE LOWER ORDER OF ANIMALS!"
The mighty defender of the faith Bryan, who was hidden under the prosecution desk, tried to run away unnoticed in the confusion like the coward he was.
Millie spotted him.
"Yokel scum!"
With a mighty upward swing, her axe went through his parts, opening the Bible-beating bastard Bryan like a codfish.
A reverend, the wrath of the Authority burning in his maddened eyes, walked toward the four demons holding his Bible and the full might of the Word of God!
"And He shall smite the wicked and plunge them into the Fiery P-"
Blitz rolled his eyes and shot him in the dick.
The remaining Klansmen were now running away.
"Christ on a stick, this place is a mess!" Blitz exclaimed, "We need to make space for the portal!"
They were throwing chairs and corpses away from the center of the courtroom when Moxxie's strategic sense started tingling...
"They're not fleeing... They're retreating..."
He looked out a window and saw-
"GET DOWN!"
The windows were obliterated, filling the room with deadly shards of glass; nothing could be heard but the thundering roar of heavy machine gun fire!
"DAD, THE PORTAL!"
"WORKING ON IT!"
The Klansmen were regrouping outside...
"Brothers!" Their leader proclaimed epically, wielding his sword, "It's time to do what we brave white men of the South do best...
...A full front infantry attack! CHARGE!"
They stormed the Courthouse, shooting at anything in sight...
...they entered the courtroom in time to see the four demons and an unconscious Scopes vanish into a pink, crystalline portal, that quickly closed behind them...
There was no trace of them left; nothing except a small, shining metallic orb that was emitting an increasingly insistent beeping-
...
Seconds later, Rhea County was in dire need of a new Courthouse.
...
When Scopes awoke, he was having the most awful headache in his life. He could have swore his brain went through a meat-grinder...
He was in a hospital bed. Without the slightest idea as to how he got there...
For some reason he could not fathom, the light entering the room from a large window to the right side of the bed was of a light shade of purple...
He started looking around... hoping to see something that would help him remember what happened... 'Surely a doctor would be here soon...' he thought...
Right next to his bed, someone had left a note and a book...
He took the note in his hand and started reading... It was written in a strangely elegant, antiquated style.
To John Thomas Scopes
Wishing you a speedy recovery
A friend
He glimpsed at the book. The cover read:
THE DESCENT OF DEMONS
by Charles Darwin
...
To this day, the Scopes Trial stands as one of the defining events not just of American history, but of the history of the world.
A symbol of mankind's aspiration to freedom in the face of bigotry and Evil.
With the story of a short trial in Dayton, Tennessee, comes a modern gospel; the good news of the coming victory of Science against Religion...
...when the creationists- traitors of mankind- shall inherit the wind, and the evolutionists, armed with Lucifer's mighty steel, shall inherit the Earth.