Snip introductory gibberish...
I'm conservative, and I think Intelligent Design is a crock.
I highly doubt, if you are like most who would make that kind of statement, that you would know serious ID if it reared up and consumed both cheeks without chewing.
ID is a serious scientific and philosophical critique of Darwinism, and can be taught in that light, less taking up time in science classes. Darwinism, beyond evolutionary biology per se, functions as an ideology among many scientists and sits at the base of a world view that
does get taught in science classes but has
no more business being there then does fundamentalist creationism.
I wish I had better news for you, but that's about it. :( If I were a supporter, I would be thinking about what I was going to call Intelligent Design after the phrase "Intelligent Design" becomes as toxic as its previous moniker "Creationism". Maybe "Scientific Theory of Evolutionary Design" or "Scientific Theory of Spackle To Fill Holes in the Real Theory of Evolution Using Anything We Can Make Up"
Rama lama ding dong. Some aspects of Darwinism are certainly in for a dust up eventually as new knowledge is acquired. There is no conceivable mathematical or probabilistic possibility of either the universe, the earth, or the biosphere upon it having come about through purely random chance evolutionary events. This is no longer arguable to those who have seriously studied the matter with an open mind (and are familiar with the work of Jeans, Whitehead, Eddington, Hoyle, and many other essentially secular critics who accept evolution but not Darwinian fundamentalism).
But such claims regarding ultimate origins or causes is not an essential or necessary extrapolation from evolutionary biology's core assertions about the development of biological life. It is, indeed, a
scientistic leap into philosophical territory (origins and meaning) that evolution cannot make but
Darwinism shys not away from making. People like Sagan, Dawkins, Hawking, Dennet, and many others have built careers dressing up science as philosophy and metaphysics in this manner, yet they don't want anyone else outside the gnosis doing the same.
Darwinism is essential to the secularist/leftist/materialist world view, as much as to the philosophy and politics that flow from that world view, and this is why it is defended with such venom and ferocity; not because it matters in any underlying sense (as, if Darwinism is ultimately true, nothing actually does), but because entire egos and ideological structures are dependent upon it. Whatever its scientific status, Darwinism is the hot button it is for its true believers precisely because of its philosophical, psychological, ideological, and sociological value, not the pros and cons of its central empirical claims (which may be something very close to the truth, for all I care).