By PLS
Art, science and politics have converged recently to deliver a message that should have been obvious: you can’t win a battle of words or ideas if you won’t engage–and strongly.
Just this week came the eagerly awaited decision in Kitzmiller et al v. Dover, which held that “intelligent design” is warmed over “creationism,” aka religion, and may not, therefore, be taught as science in the public schools of Dover, Pennsylvania. Although some reporters, predictably, turned up Dover locals willing to snarl, “My gran’daddy was no ape,” the scientists who testified on behalf of parents suing to abort their school board’s attempt to undermine the authority of the theory of evolution were able to prove to the law’s satisfaction that nothing’s necessarily mystical about complexity in biological organisms. The Dover decision doesn’t yield a binding precedent for courts throughout the country, or even the state, but the transcript of testimony alone provides powerful ammunition to other school districts besieged by those intent on insinuating Christian doctrine into science curricula.
Now here’s the point I wish to pound home: this science-friendly decision wouldn’t have been possible if reputable scientists weren’t willing to make the case, to argue the obvious, to debate the fundamentalists.
A documentary screened on December 11 as part of the Santa Fe Film Festival illustrates the opposite effect: a lost opportunity. Viewers accused director Cynthia Buzzard of doing a thoroughly mediocre job of representing the First Amendment guarantee of free speech to which she herself was committed, she confessed, somewhat reluctantly.
The film Bikini Virgin on Trial attempted to encapsulate a controversy that had Santa Feans angrily choosing sides a few years ago.
A computer-generated non-traditional version of the deeply revered Virgin of Guadalupe was displayed at the New Mexico state-funded International Museum of Folk Art. The exhibit itself was publicized as an avant garde presentation of “cyberarte” by several Latinas, which should have signaled it as no occasion for pious genuflecting. Even so, in the spirit of the defenders of “intelligent design,” who were unable to articulate their corrective to evolutionary theory, some of the most vociferous objectors to the novel Guadalupe proudly asserted they’d never laid eyes on the objectionable image. 
Where did the artist, Mexican-American Alma Lopez of Los Angeles, go wrong? Meaning: in what way did she depart from tradition (often considered a sin in its own right)? Compare the images shown here. The traditional Virgin of Guadalupe folds her hands in prayer. She casts her eyes modestly downward and to the side. She’s a shrinking violet, and her woman’s body is so overdraped you can't tell if it's male or female. In short, she’s represented as a respectable European woman back in the days when women had no rights, when they dared not look anyone straight in the eye, when fading into the background was propriety, when women’s position and posture put them always in the position of begging, which is also to say, of praying. In those days, a woman’s body was a matter of shame, a reminder of the humiliating sexuality in which humanity was trapped, and the more it was concealed the better. She was legally the chattel of her husband or father.
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