La fin de l’affaire Coppedge

Since I started this out with a nod to an actual case of unjust persecution, I feel I need to keep to the French title scheme. The following is from the June 2010 issue of The North Texas Skeptic:

We have previously covered the Sternberg Affair and the Gonzalez Affair, both covered in director Nathan Frankowski’s 2008 video Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Richard Sternberg previously was editor of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, and in this capacity he authorized publication of a paper advocating Intelligent Design. The paper was submitted by Stephen C. Meyer, a fellow of the Discovery Institute and director of its Center for Science and Culture (CSC). The CSC is the major organization advocating Intelligent Design in the United States.

Subsequently Sternberg was no longer the journal’s editor, and his work at the Smithsonian Institution was hampered. He had to give up the keys to his office and was relocated to a less desirable work space at the Institution. Also, his access to the Institution’s collections was restricted.

That’s what we get from the Discovery Institute. The complete story is more interesting.

Guillermo Gonzalez was a rising star doing postdoctoral work in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Washington. However, as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University he was denied tenure, meaning his position had a limited shelf life.

The Discovery Institute would have us believe Gonzalez was “expelled” for his religious views (favoring Intelligent Design). Again, the complete story is more interesting.

Now we come to the Coppedge Affair.

Here is how the Discovery Institute told it:

He is a top-level computer specialist on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Cassini mission to Saturn whose supervisors demoted and humiliated him for raising scientific issues about intelligent design. Last week he sued in the Superior Court of the State of California, complaining of religious discrimination, harassment, and wrongful demotion. Sounds like a news story, doesn’t it?

Intelligent design isn’t religion, but Coppedge’s supervisor, Gregory Chin, harangued him for “pushing religion” after Coppedge merely offered apparently interested colleagues DVDs of two documentaries on ID, Privileged Planet and Unlocking the Mystery of Life. Coppedge had every reason to think the films related to his work at JPL. Part of Caltech and operated under a contract with NASA, JPL has a longstanding program called Origins that seeks information on the origin of life on earth and hypothetically on other planets. Neither film includes religious statements or references. In fact, Privileged Planet explores cosmological issues illustrated by interviews with scientists at NASA and JPL. But since supervisor Chin called this “religion,” and since religious speech is legally protected, Coppedge seeks redress for religious discrimination. If Chin had made no mention of religion but harassed and demoted Coppedge simply for raising doubts about Darwinian evolution, as Unlocking the Mystery of Life does, that would also violate free-speech protections.

Trial proceedings ended back in April, and only just now has the judge’s opinion in the case become known. The ARS Technica site broke the story last Friday:

Judge: NASA firing of JPL employee wasn’t due to intelligent design advocacy

Employee’s firing was due to job performance, not religion.
by John Timmer – Nov 2 2012

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.

The end of an affair? Only if you are optimistic. Creationist like to milk cases like this to portray themselves as martyrs for the true religion, all the while claiming that Intelligent Design is not religion. We may hear more from them about this business. In the Coppedge affair it would appear the creationists sought to demonstrate that, although Coppedge considered Intelligent Design to be real science, his supervisors thought it was religion, so the creationists really could have it both ways. Perhaps beside the point of the whole affair is that nobody has ever demonstrated any scientific merit for Intelligent Design or any other flavor of creationism, while about seven years ago a district judge in Pennsylvania ruled that the school board defendants in the case had been unable to make the case that Intelligent Design has a scientific basis. And, yes, the judge in the Dover case also agreed that Intelligent Design is solely a matter of religion.

C’est finis.