I was encouraged to read "Inherit the Wind," about the Scopes Monkey Trials when I was a teenager.
@truth_seeker No doubt you were. Inherit The Wind openly mocked religion and the South. It was instrumental in drawing the line for people—believe as we tell you or be mocked with no mercy as an ignorant snake-handling hick. People don’t want to be mocked. They want to be seen as intelligent, intellectual.
It’s interesting because if Inherit The Wind were about politics instead of religion we would have zero tolerance. The play and the movie are progressive, biased, grossly inaccurate attempts to destroy the Biblical POV in favor of evolution. And supported by the ACLU. I can’t even begin to go into the details of the deliberate misrepresentation of the real Scopes trial and its participants; it’s all easily found online.
Take that description 👆 and change it a little to a progressive, biased, grossly inaccurate, ACLU-supported play/ movie about Donald Trump. Or Mike Pence, or conservatives in general. We wouldn’t give it the time of day.
Inherit The Wind portrays the people of the town where it took place as a bunch of backward Southern idiots, with a girl screaming that Clarence Darrow was the devil and running away in terror like some superstitious 10th century serf. Does this seem realistic in any way? Or maybe like a production with an agenda?
William Jennings Bryan wasn’t a raving jerk in real life. Clarence Darrow was an outspoken agnostic. Yet Darrow is portrayed as the sensible, enlightened man who wants to save us from “medieval nonsense.â€
As for the actual trial? Scopes wasn’t even a biology teacher. The ACLU was looking for someone to test the law—they placed a newspaper ad—and he agreed to do it. Much of the pro-evolution evidence submitted to the court was later thoroughly discredited. Piltdown Man, for one.
The 90th anniversary of the Scopes trial was celebrated by sources such as Politico, Time, Vox, NPR, and The Progressive.
See the problem?