When it comes to teaching intelligent design in social studies classes, not science classes, mind you, but social studies, ID critics were for it before they were against it.

Their strategy of attack has been simple: equate ID with creationism because creationism isn’t allowed in science classes. Thus, for years we’ve heard things like: “it may be appropriate to discuss these beliefs in a comparative religion or social studies classroom”; and “to present it as a valid alternative to evolution in a science class (as opposed to teaching about it in a social studies class) is unconstitutional.”

The Darwin only lobby group National Center for Science Education published a piece advocating exactly this approach in 2004:

Elementary teachers have backbones, inherited from the earliest fish in ancient seas. Teachers should use their backbones to stand tall and teach basic science. Tell the kids who object that they don’t have to accept it, but they do have to understand it to graduate. Teach students about the wide range of creation stories, too, but do it during social studies.

Clearly for such dogmatists, intelligent design isn’t fit for science classes. Their alternative was that it should be taught in classes like social studies, worldviews, comparative religions or philosophy (yeah right, when was the last time you heard of a public high school with a philosophy class?). This has been the mantra that’s been repeated by the NCSE, People for the American Way, and countless other Darwin only activists. But not any more.

Now that they think they’ve succeeded in suppressing ID and stifling any dissent from Darwinism from being discussed in science classes, it’s apparently time to rethink that idea of letting such ideas be discussed anywhere on campus at all. Three years after endorsing censoring science classes and relegating intelligent design to discussion in social studies, the NCSE is now flip-flopping and praising censorship of social studies classes as well.

Social studies may, at first glance, seem to be a better fit for this approach to teaching intelligent design, but the same constitutional issues arise whether religious beliefs are taught in science or in the social studies curriculum. — National Council for Social Studies

The NCSE and the NCSS have made it quite clear that they see no room for any discussion of intelligent design anywhere in schools today. Not in science, not in social studies, and if the Darwinists have their way, not in lunchrooms, hallways or on the front steps either. It seems they won’t be satisfied until non-Darwinian thoughts are banished from students’ minds altogether.

Try as they might, they can’t ban thinking about intelligent design. Thoughtful students will continue to explore what is so dangerous about this idea that no one can even be allowed to whisper its name.