Lincoln exposed...

No, not as gay, but as a closet... Intelligent Design theorist! In his A House Divided speech, Lincoln addressed the controversy that arose after the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed through Congress. Lincoln argued that the Act, allowing citizens in new territories to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, violated the Missouri Compromise, which essentially kept slavery withing the confines of the Southern states. In making his case, he refers to the actions of "Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James" (Senator Stephen Douglas, former President Franklin Pierce, Chief Justice Roger Taney, and President James Buchanan) and whether their actions were planned or not. As you read the excerpt, consider the idea of using specified complexity to indicate intelligent design.

And why the hasty after indorsements of the decision by the President and others? We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen - Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance - and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few - not omitting even scaffolding - or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in - in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck. (emphasis in original)