Joseph C. Daniel, Jr. v. Hugh Waters, Chairman, Textbook Commission of the State of Tennessee

EDWARDS, Circuit Judge.

We are confronted in this appeal by a 1974 version of the legislative effort to suppress the theory of evolution which *487produced the famous Scopes “monkey trial” of 1925. See Scopes v. State, 154 Tenn. 105, 289 S.W. 363 (1927). In this instance the Tennessee Legislature has sought to avoid direct suppression of speech and has eschewed direct criminal sanctions. But the purpose of establishing the Biblical version of the creation of man over the Darwinian theory of the evolution of man is as clear in the 1973 statute as it was in the statute of 1925.

Plaintiffs are…