Apparently the folks in the intelligent design creationism crowd are going to try and stick to the story that P. Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins were somehow doing something dishonest or unsavory when they tried to attend/did attend, respectively, a showing of Expelled last Thursday evening (3-20-08).

Bruce Chapman President of the Discovery Institute claimed yesterday (3-21-08) that Dawkins (and Myers) had stooped to “gate-crashing” the showing and that:

Dawkins apparently acknowledged that he had not been invited and did not have a ticket. A sophomoric side to his ideological campaign is thus revealed.

The only little problem here Bruce is that both Myers and Dawkins were signed up legitimately (under Myers name) through an open to the public internet site inviting people to sign up in order to see test screening of the film, and no one had tickets, they were not used at the event. So someone is being “sophomoric” here but it is not Dawkins or Myers.

Now Denyse O’Leary over at Uncommon Descent is saying that Myers and Dawkins were “sneaking around” and then she mockingly asks:

What, I wonder, did Dawkins say?

Hi, I’m Richard Dawkins and, even though I live in Oxford, England, I just happened to be skulking around here this evening, so I …. (?)

“Sneaking” and “Skulking around”? Yes Denyse, they were sneaking and skulking right out in the open, in line with all the other people who had signed up online to attend the film that night at AMC 14 in the Mall of America (Bloomington, MI), and no doubt they were twirling their long black mustaches and cackling maniacally the whole time.

I know that’s what I would have been doing…

The fact is Myers and Dawkins were already in area for an American Atheists Conference 2008 in Minneapolis).

Stooping to gate-crashing, uninvited, sophomoric, sneaking and skulking? I should hope that this Orwellian attempt on the part of the ID crowd to color public opinion by using such negative terms to describe their opponents actions would be quite obvious to any reasonable person.

Hey, huh, Bruce, Denyse, the book 1984 was a cautionary tail, not a how-to manual, OK?

Update (3-29): DaveScot at Uncommon Descent is now making analogies between Myers signing up to see Expelled and his calling into the producers teleconference to rape, in which the producers are the victims and Myers is the rapist with his supporters blaming the victim. Yeah that’s not a loaded analogy there Dave. The post is titled “Serial Gate-crasher” (serial rapist?) and he leaves several comments make the rape analogy #1, #2.