So, this caught my eye:
California Science Center is sued for canceling a film promoting intelligent design
The American Freedom Alliance says the center bowed to pressure from the Smithsonian. The science center says a news release hadn’t been submitted to the museum, violating the contract.
L.A.’s California Science Center will start the new year defending itself in court for canceling a documentary film attacking Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
A lawsuit alleges that the state-owned center improperly bowed to pressure from the Smithsonian Institution, as well as e-mailed complaints from USC professors and others. It contends that the center violated both the 1st Amendment and a contract to rent the museum’s Imax Theater when it canceled the screening of “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.”
The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by the American Freedom Alliance, an L.A.-based group described by senior fellow Avi Davis as a nonprofit, nonpartisan “think tank and activist network promoting Western values and ideals.”
This is a familiar wingnut gambit: get a respectable institution with ‘Science’ in its name to somehow screen a Creationist crap movie, and then trumpet the fact that it’s being screened, as if scientists take it seriously. It happened to The Smithsonian. It happened to the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Oklahoma. And now the anti-science folks tried it with our California Science Center, but failed.
When the best they can do to pretend Creationism could ever be taken seriously is this sort of p.r. sleight-of-hand, I’d say they’ve proven they’re intellectually bankrupt. And when the uber-hacks at Creationism Central, the Discovery Institute, release chintz like this, making the California Science Center look like a Non-Science Center, you can bet someone should and will be pissed:
AMERICAN FREEDOM ALLIANCE EVENT SERIES HIGHLIGHTS
THE DEBATE AT FILM DEBUT SCREENING OCTOBER 25LOS ANGELES, CA — Highlighting the continuing controversy over the origins of life on earth, the American Freedom Alliance will premiere “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion” at the California Science Center in Los Angeles on Sunday October 25 at 7:00 pm. The event will feature a panel discussion with filmmakers and leading proponents of the movement to examine the scientific inconsistencies of the famous British naturalist’s theories proposed in his work, On the Origin of Species, first published exactly 150 years ago . . .
There are plenty of mysteries surrounding the details of Evolution, but there’s no ‘continuing controversy’ about the essential theory itself. This makes the Science Center look like fools, and it’s exactly why they demand that hype about their scheduled events go through them.
The AFA and the Discovery Institute are certainly entitled to their opinions, but duping science institutions into their circus acts and then suing when they predictably back out, demanding they declare their own actions ‘Unconstitutional!’, is nothing less than pathetic. It’s a childish game.
Grow up. And show your movies at your churches if you like, those are the people who created Creationism. None of us are demanding you screen our atheist pics there.
More on the AFA later.
up america!!!! obama is a radical! white house guest list reveals just how radical he is!
In the desperate push for Obamacare, the White House spin doctors are pulling out all the stops to distract from the disastrous numbers by ginning up emotions.