But in short: they knew what the rules were going in. If they didn't like the rules, they shouldn't have played by them. There are plenty of institutions which don't place the same value on scholarly publications as the big universities. Gonzalez landed the tenure-track, then didn't fulfill the conditions for tenure. But then he compounded his error by successfully soliciting help from the krypto-religious ideologues at DI, and became a poster child for their peculiar brand of intellectual freedom.

This ended any hope he ever could have had for professional rehabilitation, and now he's stuck in an academic limbo of his own making. Of course DI will stand by their poster child: they can't afford to pasture this losing horse without donors calling their barely-existent credibility into serious question. Once they included their court astronomer among the ranks of the EXPELLED, they were duty-bound not to expel him themselves. So they crow about securing him a 0.5-meter, and issue press releases.

Now, with four times the power of my backyard instruments, unlimited access to one of those babies would send an amateur like me into paroxysms of ecstasy. But sober reflection suggests that there isn't much a 20-inch can do to advance Gonzalez' hypothesis about a privileged status for Earth: it simply hasn't the resolution, especially from low altitudes. Given some good computing power, he might be able to find evidence for a few nearby extra-solar Jupiter-sized planets, but he'd better hurry.

So the DI sensibly throws in a squib about getting time on the MacDonald. Well, now we're barely starting to bat in the necessary ballpark for instrument size, but we're still hoping to tease out spectral data from an earth-sized planet transiting a distant sun-like star here. I don't hold out much hope for that happening until the Webb Space Telescope is operational in the next decade. Then there's the whole problem of proving a negative: one exception and your whole hypothesis is nothing more than an ink stain.

DI may as well have bought their court astronomer tickets to a peep show (>slap! Bad Farb! Bad, bad, Farb!<). In essence, they already have, and are congratulating themselves for their generous patronage.

What is more, if the real reason that Gonzalez was fired had to do with DI, then you would expect otherwise he would have gotten tenure. That means the tenure decision would have either not really had sufficient grounds to deny him tenure or would have fabricated reasons to deny him tenure. Either way the DI would have revealed the problems with the decision. The fact that they haven’t is very strong evidence that the decision contains sufficient valid reasons to deny him tenure (or, rather, insufficient valid reasons to give it to him, since tenure is something that must be earned).

As to the topic at hand: I still don’t understand how ANYONE can reconcile a belief in biblical fairy tales which directly conflict with known scientific fact so as to call themselves a scientist. “Yes, the Bible is accurate and the word of god, but I see scientific evidence of a planet far older than 6,000 years. So, I don’t take the biblical text literally (as it says I must), yet I still remain faithful to it and its contents.” Huh? How can this conflict be reasoned away? Haven’t the various religions cast out folks for lesser offenses of unbelief? Isn’t the official dogma of all religions an either/or proposition: either adopt the creed TOTALLY or be excluded from the fold? Or, am I misinterpreting those main areas of the Koran and the Bible (in all its versions) which deny membership to all unbelivers for even the slightest fudging of the dogma?

You may be right. Yet it’s also not that hard to engineer a decision off-stage – that’s part and parcel of the world of politics – and that seems where DI is headed with the e-mails. Yet you could be right. It’s all about as clear as dirt pudding.