Head of right-wing, Christian law firm told leaders to be 'clever as serpents.' That's what they did.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
This piece of wisdom from Maya Angelou, one of the wisest souls to ever live, is worth repeating. And it applies to a slow-moving crisis now unfolding in York County today.
In 2005, the Independence Law Center’s chief counsel, Randall Wenger, told conservative Christian leaders gathered for a Pennsylvania Family Institute conference to learn from the failure of the Dover Area School Board’s intelligent design curriculum.
From Wenger’s perspective, Dover’s elected school board members made a grave error when they spoke openly about the religious motivations behind a policy that taught students about the belief that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent creator.
He told attendees: “I think we need to do a better job at being clever as serpents.”
Nearly two decades later, the serpents have infiltrated school boards across York County and the rest of the country.
Under the guidance of Wenger and others like him, they are actively undermining one of America’s founding principles: the separation of church and state.
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The ILC forms the legal arm of a larger, far-right Christian movement whose aim is — as the PA Family Institute’s literature indicates — “for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored.”
In practice, that has meant electing policymakers who support bans on everything from abortion to books and LGBTQ+ people simply existing.
School boards represent an easy target for the far right. Traditionally, they’ve been sleepy, nonpartisan governing bodies whose primary objective is to ensure the lights stay on and the curriculum stays up to date. They don’t get a lot of scrutiny and voters tend not to be well-informed about the people they elect to these positions.
Central York’s book ban, which the Dispatch called attention to in 2021, backfired. Most of the far-right school board members who supported it were swept out of office after our reporting drew international attention.
Unfortunately, Central York was a proverbial canary in the coal mine.
Not only did Central York administrators end up banning more books — before, once again, being rebuffed — but a wave of far-right candidates backed by the PA Economic Growth PAC were elected last year to school boards across York County.
The PAC’s education director, not coincidentally, is Veronica Gemma, one of the former board members who lost her seat amid the Central York book ban quagmire. Gemma helped direct this new crop of far-right leaders toward the ILC’s policies via behind-the-scenes coordination and secret meetings.
Emails obtained by the Dispatch show that Gemma invited board members from 12 school districts to a closed-door meeting at a warehouse in the rear of a Springettsbury Township strip mall — far from the scrutiny of a public school board meeting.
That event’s agenda included, you guessed it, the Independence Law Center.
Gemma specifically warned the attendees not to invite more than four board members per district, lest they run afoul of Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act and risk the proceedings becoming a matter of public record.
This year, a wave of school districts have turned to the ILC for advice and quite a few of them have begun adopting policies the ILC wrote.
And the ILC hasn’t stopped at writing policy. In at least one case, it wrote the speech that a school board president delivered — nearly verbatim — in discussing that policy.
Make no mistake: Wenger and his far-right pupils learned the lessons from Dover’s intelligent design lawsuit. They are the serpents they aspired to be.
Don’t let these serpents deceive you.
Stay vigilant.
Vote.