Jason Plotkin, York Daily Record via AP Carol Brown holds up her hand and refuses to comment as she and her husband Jeff, left, walk back into the courtroom for testimony yesterday in the Dover "intelligent design" case. Click photo for larger image.

HARRISBURG -- Carol H. Brown, a former school board member in Dover Area School District, testified yesterday that meetings last summer took on the flavor of an "old-time Christian tent revival," and that she was called an atheist and told she was going to hell by fellow board members.

Brown testified for the plaintiffs in a federal trial that is considering whether "intelligent design," the concept that says biology presents evidence of a master designer for the universe, can be taught in a public school science course.

Last October, Dover in York County changed its biology curriculum to include a brief mention of intelligent design, to be read to ninth-grade students. But two months later, a group of 11 parents sued the district to overturn the change, saying the board was trying to bring religion into the school system.

Brown, like witnesses before her, said that the October vote was the conclusion of an intermittent two-year campaign carried out by other board members to bring creationism, prayer and "a state of morality" into the Dover district. She testified that former board member William Buckingham had iterated, on several occasions, "disbelief in the separation of church and state."

Now, the school district has been sued for entangling the two, and accused of disregarding the Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution, and the body of First Amendment case law that has developed around it.

Brown said that she and her husband, former board member Jeffrey A. Brown, repeatedly warned the board that it was inviting legal action and circumventing the process by which curriculum changes are typically made.

The board departed from its custom of involving a curriculum advisory committee that includes members of the public, Brown said. Usually that board mulls curriculum changes and makes recommendations.

"It was unheard of for all of the stakeholders not to be involved in any change in the curriculum," she said.

She testified that Buckingham, during a board meeting in June 2004, responded to their warnings by calling Brown's husband a coward. Buckingham "was glad [Brown] had not been fighting during the American Revolution, because we'd still have a queen on the throne," she recalled.

She also recalled a June 2004 curriculum committee meeting during which Buckingham ticked off a list of his objections to a biology textbook the district was about to purchase. Buckingham objected not only to the teaching of evolutionary theory, which says organisms change over time and ascend from a tree of biological ancestors, but also to each instance Charles Darwin's name was mentioned in the book.

Buckingham also expressed his support for a maintenance worker who set fire to a mural, painted by a former Dover student, that depicted the evolution of man. The plywood mural, in the views of the worker and Buckingham, was full of obscenities.

After the October meeting, during which the board voted 6-3 to change the curriculum, Brown and her husband resigned in protest, citing board members who had asked them if they'd been "born again." Re-reading her resignation letter yesterday, Brown said: "I pray for you all -- that you will find the wisdom to separate your personal beliefs and desires from the proper fulfillment" of the elected office.

The first time she read the letter, during the October school board meeting, Buckingham called her an atheist, Brown testified. Some months later, she said, board member Alan Bonsell "told me I would be going to hell."

During his cross-examination of Brown, Patrick Gillen, a lawyer for the school board, questioned Brown's contention that board members approved the policy for religious reasons. He noted that one of the board members who voted for it, Sheila Harkins, supports the teaching of evolution.

"I just find it odd that you think you know why people voted the way they did," Gillen told Brown.

It was Jeffrey Brown who first introduced the term "intelligent design" to the school board, he said, before he knew what the term meant or the concepts behind it. After reading "Of Pandas and People," a beginner's manual to intelligent design, he tried to distance himself from the terminology.

"If we ever touch this subject," he recalled saying last summer, "we're going to end up in court."

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area, America's first test of whether intelligent design can be mentioned to school students in a science course, has, as expected, become a case of wide-ranging subject matter. Evolution and intelligent design are the main topics, but attorneys and witnesses also have jousted over Christianity, philosophy, geology, astronomy, chemistry, academic freedom, metaphysics, genetics, Einsteinian law and gravitational theory.

Though the case, which will likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court at its conclusion, has serious implications in the realms of science, politics and public education, it has had its lighter, sci-fi moments.

Several times, space aliens have been mentioned as the theoretical identity of the intelligent designer. Time-traveling cellular biologists from the future also were credited.

This week, Dover's attorney's also noted that some serious psychologists continue to research psychic powers, in turn suggesting that real scientists can in fact investigate subjects considered to be paranormal or supernatural.

The nonjury trial resumes today, with testimony from John Haught, professor of theology at Georgetown University. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said the trial will last five weeks.