Judge Rules NASA Employee's Firing Not Due to Intelligent Design Advocacy
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.)
Source: Ars Technica. Read full article. (link)
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