Tag: American Civil Liberties Union
The ACLU Has a History of Advocating Disparate Treatment for Intelligent Design
In my prior post, I critiqued ACLU-affiliated law professor Gary Williams for claiming that David Coppedge’s case “probably won’t have a shot in court.” If Coppedge has no case, then Mr. Williams must be saying that an employee discussing a matter relevant to the workplace and that is not prohibited by any employer policy–in a non-disruptive fashion–can be targeted when other employees expressing different views about the same topic are not penalized. But this is exactly what happened at JPL, a taxpayer funded entity: JPL has no policy against talking about intelligent design (ID), and permits employees to express viewpoints that are hostile towards ID, but when an employee expresses pro-ID speech, he’s suddenly harassed, investigated, demoted, and told to Read More ›
Is Pro-Intelligent Design Speech During Work Hours “Not Included” in Protections Against Discrimination?
In a recent post I explained why David Coppedge is alleging religious discrimination in his lawsuit against NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for shutting down his pro-intelligent design speech, even though intelligent design (ID) is science, not religion. In the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Professor Gary Williams of Loyola Law School (and former head of the Southern California ACLU) argued that even if ID is religion (or, as in Coppedge’s case, ID is labeled religion by JPL), that Coppedge’s lawsuit is weak: Certain kinds of religious activity are protected if they are not intrusive – such as wearing certain religious garb – but speech during work hours is not included, he said. So even if intelligent design is viewed as Read More ›
ACLU Lawyer and ScienceBloggers Make Off-Base Arguments Against Coppedge Case
A law professor from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles (who was previously elected head of the Southern California ACLU) was quoted in an article in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune commenting on the David Coppedge’s lawsuit against Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL): “a case like his probably won’t have a shot in court, because courts have viewed intelligent design as a religious belief, rather than a scientific theory, according to Gary Williams, a professor at Loyola Law School.” This raises the question… Does it Matter to the Case Whether Intelligent Design is Religion? First, whether courts have or have not “viewed intelligent design as a religious belief” is irrelevant to Coppedge’s lawsuit. What matters is that, as the Coppedge v. Read More ›
Banned Book Week and Intelligent Design Part 2: Attempts to Ban ID from Public Schools
Last week, in Part 1 of this 3-part series observing Banned Books Week, I recounted successful attempts to censor pro-intelligent design (ID) books from public school libraries, with high praise for such efforts from academia. But libraries, of course, aren’t the only location where Darwinists have tried to ban pro-ID materials. In 2005, Darwinists successfully banned both pro-ID books and pro-ID viewpoints from both the library and the classroom in Dover, Pennsylvania. While public support for ID has remained high even after the Dover trial, this incident sadly motivated other Darwinists around the U.S. to go out and recreate little Dovers within their own spheres of influence. For example, in the wake of the Dover incident, the president of the Read More ›
ACLU Rhetoric Falls Flat
Today an ACLU attorney, T. Jeremy Gunn, authored an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer entitled, “It’s a belief, and wrong for science courses,” which was placed side-by-side with an op-ed by Discovery Institute fellow David K. Dewolf and attorney Randall Wenger entitled “Anti-ID stance is good old intolerance again.” The arguments used by Mr. Gunn mimic those being made by the plaintiffs in the Dover trial, and are self-refuting and do not hold up to scrutiny. Firstly, Mr. Gun claims that: “ID is simply the latest incarnation of what first was promoted as ‘creationism.’” This is one of the oldest and most tiresome lines of criticism against intelligent design. It’s also one of the most simply factually incorrect criticisms of Read More ›