The Eric Hedin affair just blew up. Hear all about it, today at 1 pm Pacific Time, 4 pm Eastern [CORRECTION: 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern], on the Michael Medved Show.

You may recall that Ball State’s Dr. Hedin is currently being investigated by a panel of professors at his university, his career in jeopardy. From the start, Hedin’s most vocal persecutor, the guy with the biggest megaphone, has been University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, backed up by the rabid atheist Freedom from Religion Foundation. Now Coyne has got word that besides the offense of physicist Dr. Hedin’s creating a bibliography that includes some texts favorable to intelligent design, Ball State University has hired an actual ID advocate, astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez, who was previously the victim of discrimination for his views on ID by his former employer, Iowa State University.

Coyne is on the warpath. On today’s Science & Culture Update on the Medved Show, Mr. Medved will talk with Dr. Gonzalez’s co-author Dr. Jay Richards about the related cases, about Darwinist attempts to preemptively shut down Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt, and about the long history of Darwinists seeking to silence dissenters.

Darwinism is not just a science, not just a philosophical worldview supporting atheism and materialism, but a culture of rage and persecution. Remember what happened to Smithsonian Institution evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg just for editing Meyer’s article in a biology journal. And of course Thomas Nagel escaped harm after he wrote favorably about Stephen Meyer’s work and other pro-ID theorists only because Dr. Nagel’s position in the academic world is so totally unassailable.

Interestingly, Coyne himself has discussed a revealing earlier case at Ball State where a left-wing professor, George Wolfe, was denounced by firebrand David Horowitz.

[The] BSU professor … was accused in 2004 by right-wing nut David Horowitz of “supporting terrorists and indoctrinating students with a liberal, anti-military, anti-American political agenda.” But Wolfe’s case wasn’t similar to Hedin’s at all. There was no formal investigation, and Wolfe was quickly exonerated by the BSU president. Wolfe probably made a few “liberal” statements in his class and offended some right-wing students, who reported him.

The disparate treatment is revealing. Wolfe was not investigated and was "quickly exonerated by the BSU president." Only for teaching about intelligent design do you get strung up by your thumbs in the middle of the campus green. The local newspaper in Muncie, IN, the Star Press, has a somewhat sympathetic editorial calling for "fair treatment" for Hedin, and concluding, "Truth, whether in scientific inquiry or investigations into professors, can be elusive, but it must be pursued nonetheless." But only for teaching about ID, among conceivable scholarly thought crimes, could you end up being "investigated" in the first place!

Don’t miss the conversation between Medved and Richards. Again, it’s today at 2 pm Pacific Time. Remember you can also listen online here.

And if you have not signed the petition supporting Dr. Hedin, please do so now!