Today we looked at an astronomer who successfully sued the University of Kentucky for firing him based on his questioning of Evolution beliefs about creation. We said good for him. Many of you disagreed, as evidenced by the following comment.

From keverdene:

Um, no. If you hire someone in the sciences, he doesn't just live in a bubble and teach his little classes about neato stars and other cool heavenly stuff. A tenured faculty position means that he will be serving on committees, including curriculum development, hiring and tenure committees, in the sciences. (Not just in his own little astronomical world/department.) This is not the same thing as hiring a "Marxist economist" or someone who takes a different approach in your discipline. This is someone who fundamentally rejects the foundations of his colleagues' careers.

If a scientist openly espouses an anti-scientific, unprofessional approach to the sciences, he would be impossible to work with, because he would fundamentally disagree with his colleagues on all manner of instruction and administration, and therefore be a source of potentially severe damage to the tenure, promotion, and publication opportunities of his colleagues.

Moreover, this is a state/public school, and we've got this thing about separating Jesus from that state stuff.

Kind of like hiring a confessed murderer to work as a prison guard. Yeah. That's a better analogy.