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Commentary

Gay manager at Cisco Systems gets Dr. Frank Turek fired

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Dr. Mike Adams explains how a gay manager at Cisco Systems got Dr. Frank Turek fired for opposing same-sex marriage. Adams explains what happened in a letter addressed to the President of Cisco.

Excerpt:

I want to bring to your attention a recent decision made by your HR team that I think does not reflect your leadership of Cisco. Dr. Frank Turek was fired as a vendor for his political and religious views, even though those views were never mentioned or expressed during his work at Cisco.

[…]In 2008, Dr. Turek was hired by Cisco to design and conduct a leadership and teambuilding program for about fifty managers with your Remote Operations Services team. The program took about a year to conduct, during which he also conducted similar sessions for another business unit within Cisco. That training earned such high marks that in 2010 he was asked to design a similar program for about 200 managers within Global Technical Services. Ten separate eight-hour sessions were scheduled.

The morning after completing the seventh session earlier this year, a manager in that session —who was one of the better students in that class—phoned in a complaint. It had nothing to do with content of the course or how it was conducted. In fact, the manager commented that the course was “excellent” as did most who participated. His complaint regarded Dr. Turek’s political and religious views that were never mentioned during class, but that the manager learned by “googling” Dr. Turek after class.

The manager identified himself as gay and was upset that Dr. Turek had written this book providing evidence that maintaining our current marriage laws would be best for the country. Although the manager didn’t read the book, he said that the author’s view was inconsistent with “Cisco values” and could not be tolerated. (Dr. Turek is aware of this because he was in the room when his call came in.) The manager then contacted an experienced HR professional at Cisco who had Dr. Turek fired that day without ever speaking to him. The HR professional also commended the manager for “outing” Dr. Turek.

This firing had nothing to do with course content—the program earned very high marks from participants. It had nothing to do with budget constraints—the original contract was paid in full recently. A man was fired simply because of his personal political and religious beliefs—beliefs that are undoubtedly shared by thousands of your very large and diverse workforce.

Chastity vs sexual immorality

Let me tell you about the difference between chastity and sexual immorality. In my life, I have decided to be chaste, and what I have found is that there is a constant stream of negative judgments coming from the culture, the education system, and so forth disapproving of my decision to be chaste. But you will never see me trying to use the law to censor and coerce people who disagree with me. That is because I know that chastity is a virtue, and that chastity is necessary for a stable marriage – strictly on the peer-reviewed research.

No amount of disagreement from anti-chastity activists will make me feel bad about what I have decided to do, because I have the facts. I am not offended by incorrect views because it’s a factual question, and I’m right. And I also don’t want other people who disagree with me to celebrate my views, because they don’t hold my views. And I don’t mind that they disagree with me – my Christian worldview has a place for tolerance. Even God himself allows people to rebel against him – he doesn’t swoop down on sinners and demand obedience. He lets people decide for themselves. I want the right to voice my disagreement with others – I would not force anyone to agree with me and celebrate my views against their own will.

I think we can all see how sexual immorality is different from chastity. When people do something wrong that they know is wrong, they have a different response to being judged. Instead of ignoring the judgment as I do, they try to censor, coerce and overpower those who disagree with them. This can include the use of courts or even the use of force. The feeling of being offended is so strong for some sexually immoral people that any concerns about tolerating diverse opinions, or permitting disagreement goes out the window. Even to hear the words of disagreement is sometimes too much for a person in rebellion.

Consider this passage from Matthew 14:1-2:

1 At that time Herod the tetrarch heard the reports about Jesus,

2and he said to his attendants, “This is John the Baptist; he has risen from the dead! That is why miraculous powers are at work in him.”

3 Now Herod had arrested John and bound him and put him in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife,

4 for John had been saying to him: “It is not lawful for you to have her.”

5 Herod wanted to kill John, but he was afraid of the people, because they considered John a prophet.

6 On Herod’s birthday the daughter of Herodias danced for the guests and pleased Herod so much

7 that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked.

8 Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.”

9 The king was distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he ordered that her request be granted

10 and had John beheaded in the prison.

11 His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl, who carried it to her mother.

12 John’s disciples came and took his body and buried it. Then they went and told Jesus.

Notice that this coercion can happen with all kinds of sexual immorality – in this case, incest. The desire to not be judged about the means of pursuing pleasure is strong. No one wants to hear about the potential harm they are causing. They just want to do it, and you just need to shut up and affirm them in their self-indulgence. Celebrate Anthony Weiner. Celebrate Bill Clinton. Celebrate Tiger Woods. Celebrate Elliot Spitzer. Celebrate Arnold Schwarzenegger. Celebrate John Edwards. OR ELSE. Very few people are brave enough to talk about the victims of this adult self-indulgence. And those who do will be taken under fire for it.

Same-sex marriage and coercion

And that leads me to the question that gay activists often ask supporters of traditional marriage: “how would allowing same-sex marriage hurt your marriage?”. And now we know the answer. Same-sex marriage would likely,  criminalize free speech that promotes traditional marriage over same-sex marriage, as it has in other countries with same-sex marriage, such as Canada. If you are a working husband, and you are responsible for a family, you will be under a constant threat of termination should your pro-marriage views become known to your colleagues and supervisors. Also, if you teach you children to favor traditional marriage, you may be persecuted by the state.

I would like to be able to provide for my family if I choose to marry, and I would like my children to favor traditional marriage over cohabitation, or any other arrangement, because traditional marriage is best for children who need a stable environment with two loving biological parents (if possible). But if it becomes the law that my view is “offensive” and “discriminatory”, then that would affect my marriage. Sometimes, I am very glad that I am not married, because getting married in a society that is offended by marriage takes a lot of courage. It seems to me that many Christians, especially the uninformed emotional ones who would rather read vampire fiction and Dan Brown than peer-reviewed research, prefer to redefine Christianity to mean “affirming destructive behavior so that you feel good and more people like you”.

Let Dr. Turek’s story be a lesson to all of you who prefer traditional marriage. Don’t allow your opinions on marriage to be linked to your true identity, because some sexually immoral people will try to separate you from your livelihood if they can. It’s no longer safe to express a preference for traditional marriage in this society. If you do it, you are taking chances. Just look at the vandalism and stalking of Prop 8 supporters. If you want children to grow up with a mother and a father in this society, then you are a marked target to those who put adult hedonism above the rights of children – including many Christians who enjoy singing and schmoozing in the church. Just this week I got an anguished e-mail from someone who blogs under his real name who is now in the cross-hairs for expressing his preference for traditional marriage in public.

Note: Comments to this post will be strictly filtered in accordance with legislation passed by the Obama administration limiting the free discussion of sexual morality, which many liberal Christians voted for in 2008.

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Commentary

Prominent atheist philosopher gives mixed review of intelligent design

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Consider this report on a peer-reviewed assessment of intelligent design by the prominent atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel.

Excerpt:

Prof. Thomas Nagel, a self-declared atheist who earned his PhD. in philosophy at Harvard 45 years ago, who has been a professor at U.C. Berkeley, Princeton, and the last 28 years at New York University, and who has published ten books and more than 60 articles, has published an important essay, “Public Education and Intelligent Design,” in the Wiley InterScience Journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 36, issue 2…

[…]Prof. Nagel’s paper is a significant and substantial opening, at America’s highest intellectual level, that encourages all intelligent, educated, informed individuals — particularly those whose interest in this issue derives from intellectual curiosity, not the emotional advocacy excitement for any side — that it is legitimate as a matter of data, science, and logic, divorced from all religious texts and doctrines, to consider that intelligent design may be a valid scientific approach to understanding how DNA and the complex chemical systems of life came to attain their present form. Prof. Nagel’s article is well worth the price to put it in the library of any inquiring mind.

The actual paper is here.

Now for the summary of the paper, with supporting quotes:

Professor Nagel has read ID-supportive works such as Dr. Behe’s Edge of Evolution (p. 192). He reports that based on his examination of their work, ID “does not seem to depend on massive distortions of the evidence and hopeless incoherencies in its interpretation” (pp. 196-197). He reports that ID does not depend on any assumption that ID is “immune to empirical evidence” in the way that believers in biblical literalism believe the bible is immune to disproof by evidence (p. 197). Thus, he says “ID is very different from creation science” (p. 196).

Prof. Nagel tells us that he “has for a long time been skeptical of the claims of traditional evolutionary theory to be the whole story about the history of life” (p. 202). He reports that it is “difficult to find in the accessible literature the grounds” for these claims.

Moreover, he goes farther. He reports that the “presently available evidence” comes “nothing close” to establishing “the sufficiency of standard evolutionary mechanisms to account for the entire evolution of life” (p. 199).

He notes that his judgment is supported by two prominent scientists (Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, writing in the Oct. 2005 book Plausibility of Life), who also recognized that (prior to offering their own theory, at least) the “available evidence” did not “decisively settle[]” whether mutations in DNA “are entirely due to chance” (p. 191). And he cites one Stuart Kauffman, a “complexity theorist who defends a naturalistic theory of emergence,” that random mutation “is not sufficient” to explain DNA (p. 192).

Prof. Nagel acknowledges that “evolutionary biologists” regularly say that they are “confiden[t]” that “random mutations in DNA” are sufficient to account for “the complex chemical systems we observe” in living things (p. 199) — but he disagrees. “Rhetoric” is the word Professor Nagel uses to rejects these statements of credentialed evolutionary biologists. He judges that the evidence is NOT sufficient to rule out ID (p. 199).

He does not, however, say that the evidence compels acceptance of ID; instead, some may consider as an alternative to ID that an “as-yet undiscovered, purely naturalistic theory” will supply the deficiency, rather than some form of intelligence (p. 203).

In light of these considerations, Prof. Nagel says that “some part of the high school curriculum” “should” include “a frank discussion of the relation of evolutionary theory to religion” but that this need not occur in biology classes if the biology teachers would find this too much of a “burden” (p. 204). Significantly, Prof. Nagel — who is a professor of law as well as a professor of philosophy — concludes that, so long as the proposal is not introduced by religiously-motivated persons “as a fallback from something stronger,” but by persons “more neutral” or “without noticeable religious beliefs,” it would be constitutional to “mention” ID in public school science classes, because doing so genuinely furthers “the secular purpose of providing a better understanding of evolutionary theory and of the evidence for and against it” (p. 203). He makes clear that the “mention” must be a “noncommittal discussion of some of the issues” (p. 205).

So Nagel does NOT think that ID is a slam dunk, just that it is worth considering in science classrooms. Teach the controversy, that’s always the right approach. Be open-minded. Look at the evidence before you decide.

Commentary

George Will says that Ted Cruz is the candidate to rally around

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Republican Senate candidate Ted Cruz
Republican Senate candidate Ted Cruz

Kay Bailey Hutchinson has retired from the Senate, and George Will thinks that Republican candidate Ted Cruz is the man to replace her.

Excerpt:

For a conservative Texan seeking national office, it could hardly get better than this: In a recent 48-hour span, Ted Cruz, a candidate for next year’s Republican Senate nomination for the seat being vacated by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, was endorsed by the Club for Growth PAC, FreedomWorks PAC, talk-radio host Mark Levin and Erick Erickson of RedState.com.

For conservatives seeking reinforcements for Washington’s too-limited number of limited-government constitutionalists, it can hardly get better than this: Before he earned a Harvard law degree magna cum laude (and helped found the Harvard Latino Law Review) and clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz’s senior thesis at Princeton — his thesis adviser was professor Robert George, one of contemporary conservatism’s intellectual pinups — was on the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th amendments. Then as now, Cruz argued that these amendments, properly construed, would buttress the principle that powers not enumerated are not possessed by the federal government.

Robbie George??? Robbie George??? Holy snouts! That guy is one of the top academic pro-lifers. Every Christian apologist knows about Robbie George. It’s the law! Well, it isn’t. But it should be!

I continue:

At age 14, Cruz’s father fought with rebels (including Fidel Castro) against Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Captured and tortured, at 18 he escaped to America with $100 sewn in his underwear. He graduated from the University of Texas and met his wife — like him, a mathematician — with whom he founded a small business processing seismic data for the oil industry.

By the time Ted Cruz was 13, he was winning speech contests sponsored by a Houston free-enterprise group that gave contestants assigned readings by Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. In his early teens he traveled around Texas and out of state giving speeches. At Princeton, he finished first in the 1992 U.S. National Debate Championship and North American Debate Championship.

As Texas’s solicitor general from 2003 to 2008, Cruz submitted 70 briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has, so far, argued nine cases there. He favors school choice and personal investment accounts for a portion of individuals’ Social Security taxes. He supports the latter idea with a bow to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said such accounts enable the doorman to build wealth the way the people in the penthouse do.

Regarding immigration, Cruz, 40, demands secure borders and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants but echoes Ronald Reagan’s praise of legal immigrants as “Americans by choice,” people who are “crazy enough” to risk everything in the fundamentally entrepreneurial act of immigrating.

He is a hard-core Republican. He has Republican experiences: legal immigrant, fought communism, studied something that required actual work, founded a small business, etc. This is the prototypical Republican!

You can find out more about him on his positions page. I was interested in his stance on social issues, in particular.

Excerpt:

Ted Cruz has fought to protect innocent human life. He played a leading role in several important cases, including defense of the partial-birth abortion ban, parental consent laws, and prohibiting state funds from going to abortion. These cases have all been part of the ongoing effort to ensure that every child in America  receives the protection and respect he or she deserves.

  • Authored an amicus brief for 13 states, successfully defending the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The ban was upheld 5-4 before the U.S. Supreme Court;
  • Authored an amicus brief for 18 states, successfully defending the New Hampshire parental notification law. The law was upheld 9-0 before the U.S. Supreme Court [note: this brief was awarded the Best Brief Award from the National Association of Attorneys General for U.S. Supreme Court briefs written in 2005-06];
  • Successfully defended Texas’s Rider 8, which prohibits state funds for groups that provide abortions, winning unanimously before the Fifth Circuit court of appeals.

Ted Cruz has worked hard in defense of traditional marriage, including his intervention in a case protecting Texas marriage laws. In addition, he has fought on the federal level to defend marriage between one man and one woman as the fundamental building block of society.

  • When a Beaumont state court granted a divorce to two homosexual men who had gotten a civil union in Vermont, Cruz, under the leadership of Attorney General Greg Abbott, intervened in defense of the marriage laws of the State of Texas, which successfully led to the court judgment being vacated;
  • Worked with Attorney General Abbott to send a letter to Congress in support of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

He has lots of nice actions related to lots of conservative policies on that page. What a resume! Energy production, voter fraud prevention, border security, legal firearm ownership – you name it, this guy has been fighting for conservative principles. Like Michele Bachmann, (and unlike RINO Mitt Romney), he has actually tried to do pro-life and pro-marriage things. We don’t just have to take his word for it, he has the actions to prove his words. Just look at the list of issues on his page!

It’s so funny, because on that page, he says this: “You say you believe in these principles. Show me. When have you fought for conservative principles and what have you accomplished?” This is exactly the question we should be asking of any political candidate. Show. Me. The. Record.