Read the petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal.

Barbara Forrest is a noted secular humanist and a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, La., and co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. (Read the first chapter, posted at TalkReason.org.) She says the debate over intelligent design and evolution is necessarily a religious, and not a scientific one because intelligent […]

Ben Bridges Sr. is a Republican in the Georgia House of Representatives who introduced HB 179 in January 2005; it would require the teaching of critiques of and alternatives to evolution wherever evolution is taught.

Richard Thompson is president and chief counsel of The Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., which defended the Dover, Pa., district in a lawsuit that challenged its rules requiring the teaching of intelligent design in public schools.

L. Martin Nussbaum is a partner at Rothgerber, Johnson & Lyons, where he represents religious institutions and schools in legal cases, including First Amendment cases. He works in Colorado Springs, Colo.

W. Cole Durham Jr. is a law professor and director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He has worked on religious freedom issues around the world.

Frank Ravitch is chair of law and religion at Michigan State University and a scholar of constitutional religious freedom protections. He is author of  several books on the Constitution’s religion clauses, including Freedom’s Edge: Religious Freedom, Sexual Freedom, and the Future of America and Masters of Illusion: The Supreme Court and the Religion Clauses.

Carl Esbeck is a professor of law at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he specializes in First Amendment issues, especially the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses.

John Tuskey is a lawyer in Indiana and formerly taught at Regent University’s School of Law in Virginia Beach, Va., where he specialized in constitutional law.