Tag: discrimination

Florist rejects attorney general’s deal to settle lawsuit over same-sex weddings

9:57 pm

The Washington florist whose entire assets a judge has ruled can be confiscated because she refuses to participate in a same-sex wedding because of her Christian religion has rejected outright a settlement offered to her by the state’s attorney general.

Ms. Stutzman [the florist] rejected Friday a settlement agreement offered by Mr. Ferguson [the attorney general] that would have required her to pay $2,001 in damages and legal fees after a judge ruled last week that she violated state law by declining to provide services for a same-sex wedding. “My primary goal has always been to bring about an end to the Defendants’ unlawful conduct and to make clear that I will not tolerate discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” Mr. Ferguson said in a statement.

The agreement also would require Ms. Stutzman to agree “not to discriminate in the future,” which means she must provide custom floral arrangements for same-sex weddings or stop doing weddings altogether, said Peter LaVallee, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office.

In rejecting the offer, Stutzman was very blunt about her reasons.

“Your offer reveals that you don’t really understand me or what this conflict is all about,” Ms. Stutzman said in a letter to Mr. Ferguson. “It’s about freedom, not money. I certainly don’t relish the idea of losing my business, my home, and everything else that your lawsuit threatens to take from my family, but my freedom to honor God in doing what I do best is more important.

“…I pray that you reconsider your position. … I kindly served Rob [the gay plaintiff] for nearly a decade and would gladly continue to do so. I truly want the best for my friend. I’ve also employed and served many members of the LGBT community, and I will continue to do so regardless of what happens with this case.”

She concluded, “You chose to attack my faith and pursue this not simply as a matter of law, but to threaten my very means of working, eating, and having a home. If you are serious about clarifying the law, then I urge you to drop your claims against my home, business, and other assets and pursue the legal claims through the appeal process.”

The mildness of the attorney general’s offer suggests to me that he is feeling some political heat. He looks like a tyrant and a bad guy who is trying to destroy this woman expressly because of her religious beliefs. He thus wants this case to end with a victory, but to end as quickly as possible.

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When asked in a survey if they would discriminate against conservatives, the academic community freely admitted that it would gladly do so.

10:31 am

The tolerance of the left: When asked in a survey if they would discriminate against conservatives, the academic community freely admitted that they would gladly do so.

One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).” More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”

Then there’s this:

Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers found that conservatives fear that revealing their political identity will have negative consequences. This is why New York University-based psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-described centrist, has compared the experience of being a conservative graduate student to being a closeted gay student in the 1980s.

In 2011, Mr. Haidt addressed this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — the same group that Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammer surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind” examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000 academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals. Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any conservatives in the house, just three hands — 0.3 percent — went up.

This is “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said.

What is horrifying to me is that this prejudiced behavior is taking place within our society’s supposingly most educated community., the place where thoughtful, rational debate is supposed to be cherished and honored. How can we have a just and fair-minded culture if our elite education system is home to this kind of close-minded and hateful bigotry?

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The testimony of the fired JPL employee who is claiming religious discrimination continued on Monday.

8:49 am

The testimony continued on Monday of the fired JPL employee who is claiming the science center fired him because of his religious beliefs.

[David Coppedge] trial’s started last week, and on Monday [he] testified that his supervisor Gregory Chin had wrongly accused him, threatened his freedom of religion and created a potentially hostile working environment. “You are pushing your religion in this office and harassing people with this religion,” Chin said, according to Coppedge, who added: “He was angry and he got angrier.”

Coppedge said he asked Chin why he considered intelligent design anything but science. “Dave, intelligent design is religion,” Chin replied, according to Coppedge. Chin warned him against discussing religion or politics with colleagues, he said.

“I felt threatened .. I said: ‘Greg, this gets into issues of free speech and freedom of religion … this could be construed as creating a hostile work environment’,” he added.

Real scientists should never feel threatened by anything Coppedge was saying, and should in fact enjoy debating the issue. Unfortunately, I have learned that such open-mindedness is found with increasing rarity in modern intellectual society, especially when it comes to Judeo-Christian beliefs. This is why I tend to believe Coppedge’s story.

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Gender politics at NASA

10:35 am

O joy! It’s time to favor gender over achievement at NASA. The Obama administration is considering using governmental authority at NASA and other agencies to guarantee that the same number of women receive science, technology, engineering, and math degrees as men. The actual White House statement emphasizes the need “to ensure equity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education programs.” [emphasis mine].

If you want to be really annoyed, download NASA’s Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity documentation [pdf] and read how institutions are expected to do “periodic reviews of data broken down by gender. . . to ensure program policies and practices are not having a negative impact on program participation.” [page 5]

In other words, NASA should decide whether to provide education funds to universities, based not on the ability of those universities produce qualified engineers and scientists of any sex but on the number of women in their programs.

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