"In the summer of 2005, the intelligent-design hoax, many years in the making, blossomed spectacularly. Over the course of a few weeks, its victims made headlines around the world. 

-         Cardinal Christophe Schonborn, Roman Catholic archbishop of Vienna, published an op-ed piece in The New York Times of July 7, proclaiming the Catholic Church’s disavowal of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection.

-         A month later, President George W. Bush announced at a press conference that he was in favor of teaching schoolchildren about intelligent design, saying that “part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.”

-         Shortly afterward, Senator Bill First, the Senate majority leader, made the same point to reporters after a Rotary Club meeting in Nashville. Teach both intelligent design and evolution “doesn’t force any particular theory on anyone,” Frist said. “I think is a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future.”

 Where did nonscientists like Cardinal Schonborn, President Bush, and Senator Frist get the idea that a proposition favored by their religious perspectives is also a serious contender within science that ought to be taught? 

These declarations were a public-relations coup for a well-organized group of conservative religious activists who are intent on persuading the American public that there is a significant controversy within biology about the status of the theory of evolution by natural selection. The challenger to the scientific establishment, they suggest, is the hypothesis of intelligent design. In response to their vigorous campaign, many Americans have come to think that ID is a legitimate school of thought in biology, worth of stuff in classrooms."

 - From Danial C. Dennett's essay of the same name, in the book Intelligent Thought

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