Paul Lauer:  I’m going to jump to a question from Listen Up TV.   This is coming from Ricky Lee Ratliffe. “What would you tell a college student in a science class setting who believes in Intelligent Design as a theory, but is afraid to speak up for fear of persecution?” 

Walt Ruloff:  Well, what I would tell them is that your fear is very much justified.   That you are not alone, and that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people and students and researchers that are in your shoes.  And this has been a real problem because people are alone.   It’s very, very lonely having this position, in an academic setting, because you know that the great forces are against you.   So what is the solution?   Well, the solution is for all of us who would like to question the paradigm to get together.   Not in a hand-waving scenario or an irrational setting, but a very rational setting where we’re able to ask the questions and challenge the current orthodoxy.  That’s what’s absolutely vital and that’s what we really hope to do in a small way with this movie, and that’s what Ben hopes to do with this movie: to create, really, a unified group of people in the academy—people that are either students or researchers—to finally have the courage.  Now, ultimately what we want this to move to, is a political will.   It really is like the civil rights movement, that Ben continues to talk about, of our day, in that we have an opportunity, under a unified voice, to give free speech rights to scientists, researchers, teachers—free speech rights for those people who dissent from Darwinism.  And that legislation can be done, and it needs to be done.  

Paul Lauer:   Ben,  related to that, Matthew Hawkins, from the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, asks if you have a personal connection, in some way, to this issue, and, in particular, how it relates to Nazism?

Ben Stein: Well, I mean, as a Jew, I am horrified, fascinated and compelled by the idea that people thought Jews were so inferior that they simply didn’t deserve to live; and I am compelled by the idea that if I had been living in Europe, during the era of Hitler, I would have been deprived of life by virtue of a Darwinist thought, which was that I was inferior and was competing for valuable resources of people who were my biological superior.  Therefore, my life had to be snuffed out. Yes, I have very much of a powerful, emotional connection with that.  

Paul Lauer:  This is an interesting question coming from Rod Kirkpatrick at Focus on the Family: “Accepting that those in academia will try to maintain their place first in line to continue in their attempts to pan the film, who’s next? Who else will attempt to reject this film and become vocal in their desire to discredit what this film is doing?” 

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