> No matter what anyone else tells you...
> ANASAworker was fired for hisintelligentdesignbeliefs.
>
> In otherwords, the minute you bring up any edvidence of 'design', the scientific community will *shoot* you down. That's their law!
>
> The law of the 'scientific community' is; "Anybody mentions the word GOD, fuckin kill him!!!"
>
> Mafia Science at it's best.
>
> The Starmaker
>
> (you can tell i'm gettin over my cold)
Judge: NASA firing of JPL employee wasn't due to intelligent design
advocacy
http://is.gd/X3dFMr
Earlier today, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's staff were busy
recounting their latest successes on the surface of Mars. At the same
time, news broke that JPL's lawyers were succeeding in the courtroom.
In 2010, JPL was sued by an employee for religious discrimination
after it asked him to (among other things) stop aggressively promoting
intelligent design at work. A wrongful termination charge was added
less than a year later after the employee, David Coppedge, was let go.
But the judge overseeing that case has accepted the JPL's arguments
that Coppedge was let go for performance reasons as part of a larger
cutback of staff.
Coppedge had worked on the Cassini mission to Saturn, starting as a
contractor in 1996, and later becoming a full-time employee. But one
of the projects he pursued on his own time was the promotion of
intelligent design, the notion that the Universe and, most
prominently, life itself, is too orderly to have come about without a
designer. (Like many others in that movement, Coppedge is a self-
identified evangelical Christian.)
In 2009, he apparently got a bit aggressive about promoting these
ideas at work, leading one employee to complain. The resulting
investigation found that he had also aggressively promoted his opinion
on California's gay marriage ban, and had attempted to get JPL's
holiday party renamed to "Christmas party." (There's detailed
background on the case here.) Coppedge was warned about his behavior
at work, but he felt it was an infringement of his religious freedom,
so he sued. Shortly after, as part of a set of cutbacks on the Cassini
staff, he was fired.
In court, Coppedge and his lawyer portrayed him as being targeted for
promoting an idea that is, to put it mildly, not popular with
scientists. But JPL's legal team introduced evidence that his
aggressive promotion of it at work was part of a pattern of bad
interactions with his fellow employees that dated back at least five
years earlier. In this view, pushing intelligent design on his co-
workers was just one facet of a set of behaviors that made the working
environment awkward and less productive. The judge hearing the case
has decided that JPL's version of the matter is accurate, and he's
asked lawyers to submit potential rulings based on that decision. A
final verdict based on those should be released next month.