What's with "teaching the controversy"?

(Hat tip: Abnormal Interests.)

Joe Kapinsky writes in Spiked Online about the compromising of science.

The attacks on evolution have come from the Christian community, but it's a leftist ideal that has allowed the attacks to take place at all. The ideal is that of multiculturalism...

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Intelligent design was shaped not by the social polarisation of the 1920s, but by multiculturalism. It no longer explicitly argued for the truth of the Christian world view but rather for intelligent design to be taught alongside evolution and for State neutrality between Christianity and evolution. Whatever their private beliefs, the public arguments of intelligent design advocates are based firmly on pluralism, not Christian revelation. This is illustrated by looking at the broader framework in which creationism now struggles to make its case. In her book The Language Police, Diane Ravitch details the censorship of school materials, in particular textbooks by 'bias and sensitivity' panels (8). Her detailed study was inspired by her experience on the national assessment governing board, which was responsible for national school tests introduced by President Clinton in 1997. It reveals an interesting picture. It is true that Christian fundamentalism has had a big impact on the use of language and, for example, acceptable depictions of family life. But more important is the framework that has been developed to justify the censorship system. This system is a product, if not exactly of the left, of the multicultural-feminist mainstream that is not often associated with the Christian right. References to dinosaurs are eliminated from school texts not because they offend against the truth of the Bible, but rather in the same way that owls are eliminated on the basis that they may upset Navajo children in whose culture owls are taboo. According to bias guidelines collected by Ravitch, all religions are to be treated equally: 'no religious practice or belief is characterised as strange or peculiar, or sophisticated or primitive.' Other guidelines ban the use of words 'heathen' and 'pagan', while reserving the use of the term 'myth' to refer to ancient Greek or Roman stories. The Educational Testing Service, meanwhile, treats as 'ethnocentric' any test that focuses exclusively on 'Judeo-Christian' contributions to literature of art.

The impulse that allows for the teaching of creationism, as well as for re-structuring the curriculum to accommodate various fads, is one that, instead of asking "what is true", asks "what is equitable?"

This, for example, is why we had "equal time" laws passed which mandated the teaching of "creation science" any time evolution was taught. It was an appeal to equitiblity as an approximation for fairness.