Justice William O. Douglas's minority opinion was that the children themselves should have been consulted. Did they really want to cut short their education? Did they, indeed, really want to stay in the Amish religion? Nicholas Humphrey would have gone further. Even if the children had been asked and had expressed a preference for the Amish religion, can we suppose that they would have done so if they had been educated and informed about the available alternatives? For this to be plausible, shouldn't there be examples of young people from the outside world voting with their feet and volunteering to join the Amish? Justice Douglas went further in a slightly different direction. He saw no particular reason to give the religious views of parents special status in deciding how far they should be allowed to deprive their children of education. If religion is grounds for exemption, might there not be secular beliefs that also qualify?

The majority of the Supreme Court drew a parallel with some of the positive values of monastic orders, whose presence in our society arguably enriches it. But, as Humphrey points out, there is a crucial difference. Monks volunteer for the monastic life of their own free will. Amish children never volunteered to be Amish; they were born into it and they had no choice.

There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of 'diversity' and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture. A small part of me can see something in this. But the larger part is made to feel very queasy indeed.

The Prime Minister of my country, Tony Blair, invoked 'diversity' when challenged in the House of Commons by Jenny Tonge MP to justify government subsidy of a school in the north-east of England that (almost uniquely in Britain) teaches literal biblical creationism. Mr Blair replied that it would be unfortunate if concerns about that issue were to interfere with our getting 'as diverse a school system as we properly can'.¹⁴³ The school in question, Emmanuel College in Gateshead, is one of the 'city academies' set up in a proud initiative of the Blair government. Rich benefactors are encouraged to put up a relatively small sum of money (£2 million in the case of Emmanuel), which buys a much larger sum of government money (£20 million for the school, plus running costs and salaries in perpetuity), and also buys the benefactor the right to control the ethos of the school, the appointment of a majority of the school governors, the policy for exclusion or inclusion of pupils, and much else.

Emmanuel's 10 per cent benefactor is Sir Peter Vardy, a wealthy car salesman with a creditable desire to give today's children the education he wishes he had had, and a less creditable desire to imprint his personal religious convictions upon them.*) Vardy has unfortunately become embroiled with a clique of American-inspired fundamentalist teachers, led by Nigel McQuoid, sometime headmaster of Emmanuel and now director of a whole consortium of Vardy schools. The level of McQuoid's scientific understanding can be judged from his belief that the world is less than ten thousand years old, and also from the following quotation: 'But to think that we just evolved from a bang, that we used to be monkeys, that seems unbelievable when you look at the complexity of the human body… If you tell children there is no purpose to their life — that they are just a chemical mutation — that doesn't build self-esteem.'¹⁴⁴

No scientist has ever suggested that a child is a 'chemical mutation'. The use of the phrase in such a context is illiterate nonsense, on a par with the declarations of 'Bishop' Wayne Malcolm, leader of the Christian Life City church in Hackney, east London, who, according to the Guardian of 18 April 2006, 'disputes the scientific evidence for evolution'. Malcolm's understanding of the evidence he disputes can be gauged from his statement that 'There is clearly an absence in the fossil record for intermediate levels of development. If a frog turned into a monkey, shouldn't you have lots of fronkies?'

Well, science is not Mr McQuoid's subject either, so we should, in fairness, turn to his head of science, Stephen Layfield, instead. On 21 September 2001, Mr Layfield gave a lecture at Emmanuel College on 'The Teaching of Science: A Biblical Perspective'. The text of the lecture was posted on a Christian website (www. christian.org.uk). But you won't find it there now. The Christian Institute removed the lecture the very day after I had called attention to it in an article in the Daily Telegraph on 18 March 2002, where I subjected it to a critical dissection.¹⁴⁵ It is hard, however, to delete something permanently from the World Wide Web. Search engines achieve their speed partly by keeping caches of information, and these inevitably persist for a while even after the originals have been deleted. An alert British journalist, Andrew Brown, the Independent's first religious affairs correspondent, promptly located the Layfield lecture, downloaded it from the Google cache and posted it, safe from deletion, on his own website, http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/liars/layfield.html. You will notice that the words chosen by Brown for the URL make entertaining reading in themselves. They lose their power to amuse, however, when we look at the content of the lecture itself.

Incidentally, when a curious reader wrote to Emmanuel College to ask why the lecture had been removed from the website, he received the following disingenuous reply from the school, again recorded by Andrew Brown:

Of course, the school officials may well have been too busy to explain to journalists their stance on teaching creationism. But why, then, remove from their website the text of a lecture that does precisely that, and to which they could have referred the journalists, thereby saving themselves a great deal of time? No, they removed their head of science's lecture because they recognized that they had something to hide. The following paragraph is from the beginning of his lecture: