Sleaze and controversy from the American Freedom Association and Discovery Institute

wo years ago, a California science foundation gave permission to to the American Freedom Alliance ("freedom" is like "family" in these organizations; when you see it, you should be instantly suspicious) to show a movie in their IMAX theater. The film was titled "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record", and it was an Intelligent Design propaganda piece. This happens fairly often; these sleazy organizations love to present the illusion of being scientific, so they like to rent out halls in museums and universities in order to put on their shows. The physics auditorium on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus is apparently a very popular venue for just that reason. But it does not imply any endorsement of the content of the movie by the venue owner — it's being rented as a public exhibition space, nothing more.

Unfortunately, in this case the AFA and their co-enablers, the Discovery Institute (Hiss! Spit! Booooo!) did their very best to misrepresent this showing as an endorsement by the California Science Center Foundation. The DI was involved; you know they wanted to stir up controversy, because that's what they do. And they got it: the foundation cancelled the showing over the false representations of endorsement. So the AFA sued them, again, exactly as the DI wanted.

The lawsuit has now been settled. The AFA and DI have nothing to do but harrass with lawyers, while the foundation has the work of running a legitimate science institution to do, so they settled with an agreement (a rather contrived agreement) that they'd offer to host a movie, the AFA would agree to decline, and that the Foundation's insurance company would pay the defense's court cost to spare further litigation. And of course neither side would admit fault.

--snip--

they allowed the AFA to book the IMAX theater to show the movie; the reason they shut it down was that the Discovery Institute lied and misrepresented the position of the science foundation.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/sleaze_and_controversy_from_th.php