Cleveland.com: The Origin of the Human Species -
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Published on: 5/12/2002
Last Visited: 5/12/2002
Not that any of that bothers Bob Lattimer, for his convictions provide a certain serenity.He is the kind of man who smiles harder the more he disagrees with you.
Tonight, though, he is literally preaching to the converted; his listeners are 80 or so of his 2,000 fellow congregants at Hudson Community Chapel, a sprawling year-old evangelical church that has sprouted among the contemporary colonials of northern Summit County.If they know him at all, it is as a tenor in the choir.But if they have come expecting some kind of sermon, a biblical-based rationale for the startling guerrilla war he is waging, they will be disappointed.
"This talk is going to be about science - not much about religion at all," he declares.
His audience trickles in, in twos and threes, on this raw, rainy weeknight, a few toting Bibles, others trailing kids.At precisely 7:30 - for Lattimer, an analytical chemist by trade, is a man of precision - he stands.
He makes an awkward joke about how it's better to be here than at an Indians game, then tucks his hands in his back pockets and begins to chip away at one of the most revered scientific theories of the modern age.
Bob Lattimer is a heretic with a Ph.D. and a bully pulpit.He is taking on Charles Darwin and evolution from inside the education and science bureaucracies, and that is what makes him such a threat to the scientists and educators who are trying to keep Ohio's science curriculum free of unorthodox - they would say absurd - ideas.
Lattimer, 57, has tunneled deep into the education system he disdains, emerging on the group rewriting Ohio's science teaching guidelines.As a scientist, he is using his credentials, his reputation, to bolster the credibility of his attack on evolution's scientific underpinnings and to push for a change in the very definition of science.
Lattimer is the self-anointed statewide point man for intelligent design, evolution's latest and most sophisticated foe.He is a circuit-rider for ID, speaking wherever he's asked, lighting brush fires, stoking the coals of what he apocalyptically calls the "Ohio firestorm" to obliterate evolution's monopoly in public schools.
He goes to all the meetings.He tracks and reports ID developments on his Web site.He uses his vacation time, 20 days so far in the last 11 months, to serve on the science writing team.Without raising his reedy voice - for he is disarmingly, self-effacingly polite - he keeps talking, keeps prodding, keeps asking, keeps objecting, keeps showing up, a quiet but relentless battering ram for intelligent design.
And in a state that may well dictate the course of anti-evolution strategy for the rest of the country, at this point, Bob Lattimer is winning.
Darwin under fire
The battle to cleanse the public schools of America of Darwin's ungodly idea has been a long and losing effort.
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Bob Lattimer believes this, devoutly so, but his activism now has a decidedly less Christian overtone than before.That is the beauty and the power of intelligent design: Its intentional vagueness on who the designer is means that those who believe life's architect is the Christian God and those who are certain it is an extra-terrestrial can comfortably co-exist in ID's big tent.
Or as Lattimer says, "We like to think of it as an umbrella under which various ideas of creation can fit."
Becoming conservative
The conservatism that is the bedrock of Bob Lattimer's world and the launching pad for his intelligent-design exploits was not a birthright.His parents' suburban Kansas City, Mo., household in the 1950s was a Democratic one; his father, a tool-and-die maker for a steel company, was a union man.
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In the 1990s in his hometown of Hudson, Lattimer peddled the Christian Right's traditional remedies for societal rot: school prayer; local curriculum control; the elimination of sex education and outcome-based learning (meaning government-dictated values); support for vouchers so that fed-up parents can rescue their kids from public schools like he has.
His two sons aren't in public schools.One of his boys, Paul, the 11-year-old, has attended a private Christian academy since kindergarten.
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"I often get asked that," Lattimer says, with a ready, almost eager response to why he spends so much trying to change a system in which his children don't participate.
"I'm a taxpayer.My taxes go to support public schools.My kids interact with [public school students].It's important they get the values I feel comfortable with.I also vote, so I have a right."
Lattimer's unlined, Missouri-plain face became a familiar sight at Hudson school board meetings.He organized a local chapter of the national Citizens for Excellence in Education, an arch-conservative, Christian-oriented, education-reform group.He partnered with his friend and fellow church member Kenneth Claypoole, publicly backing the Hudson school board member's controversial stands on various issues, including teaching creationism.
The duo's notoriety peaked in 1996, when they drew national attention for lobbying against the board's selection of "The American People," a best-selling social history text.Lattimer and Claypoole said the book over-emphasized women and minorities and downplayed the accomplishments of "mainstream" historical figures.
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"Revisionist history doesn't focus on the patriotic aspects, it focuses on the negative aspects," says Lattimer now, unapologetically."Kids need heroes.They need to know there's much good in our history.Some cultures are better than others."
The culture in Hudson had just about had enough.
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And the board eventually voted to accept the book Claypoole and Bob Lattimer had fought against.
Hudson was mirroring what was going on in the rest of the country.By 1998, the Christian Right's nearly two-decade reign over American politics was in decline.The public mood had changed; the moral absolutes that had once been embraced as refreshingly frank and courageously uncompromising now seemed harsh, hypocritical.
The movement's more savvy operatives saw what was coming and knew what it meant.One of the most effective grass-roots organizations, the 170-chapter national Citizens for Excellence in Education to which Lattimer's chapter belonged, abruptly abandoned its 15-year quest to wrest control of local public school districts from "anti-Christian" education reformers.
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Lattimer, a school voucher man himself, didn't necessarily agree with Simonds' separatist solution - "He's pretty dogmatic about it," is as critical as Lattimer will get - but he sensed the same insurmountable opposition locally to traditional Christian-based education reforms as Simonds was finding nationally.The efforts of Lattimer's group became "marginalized" in Hudson, he says.Facing a brick wall, the local CEE chapter, which was loosely organized to begin with, disbanded.
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It is easy even now, four years gone, to find people in Hudson who equate Bob Lattimer with the devil himself for what he tried to do in their community.It also is easy to find those who dismiss him as an aberration.Both views are too simplistic and miss the larger point.
Hudson was a learning experience for Lattimer, a crucible for shaping and refining his activism.He learned from his mistakes there, just as he studied and learned from Kansas' brush with anti-evolutionism in 1999.
He took maximum advantage of the opportunities Hudson gave him - that democracy gives anyone, for good or ill - to mold civic policy, just as he is doing now on a bigger stage with intelligent design.Should he be faulted for outworking his opponents?Should he feel bad for figuring out how to manipulate the machine?
"I don't like what he stands for, but I have an almost grudging admiration for him," says a longtime Hudson adversary who asked not to be named."He's dedicated and single-minded.You stomp on that balloon and it pops up somewhere else.People still like to use Bob as the bogeyman.I'm upset that we're lazy in our civic duty and let people like him move in.There's a power in Bob counting on animosity and disengagement to move forward.
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"Bob is very calm," says his pastor, Joe Coffey.
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It is a cause his wife, a chemist like Bob and now a homemaker, understands.
Advocating for a creator
Bob Lattimer came late to intelligent design.For years, he brokered an uneasy and ultimately unsuccessful peace between his religious convictions and his scientific nature.
"I was a reluctant creationist because that's all there was," he says.
Clearly, scientific evidence cast doubt on the "young-earth" creationists' bel
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