Astronomer Sues University, Claiming Faith Cost Him a Job

In 2007, C. Martin Gaskell, an astronomer at the University of Nebraska, was a leading candidate for a job running an observatory at the University of Kentucky. But then somebody did what one does nowadays: an Internet search.

That search turned up evidence of Dr. Gaskell’s evangelical Christian faith.

The University of Kentucky hired someone else. And Dr. Gaskell sued the institution.

For the plaintiff, the smoking gun is an e-mail dated Sept. 21, 2007, from a department staff member, Sally A. Shafer, to Dr. Cavagnero and another colleague. Ms. Shafer wrote that she did an Internet search on Dr. Gaskell and found links to his notes for a lecture that explores, among other topics, how the Bible could relate to contemporary astronomy.

“Clearly this man is complex and likely fascinating to talk with,” Ms. Shafer wrote, “but potentially evangelical. If we hire him, we should expect similar content to be posted on or directly linked from the department Web site.”

Referring to Ms. Shafer’s concern that Dr. Gaskell was “potentially evangelical,” Francis J. Manion, Dr. Gaskell’s lawyer, said: “I couldn’t have made up a better quote. ‘We like this guy, but he is potentially Jewish’? ‘Potentially Muslim’?”

With his faith, Dr. Gaskell, who now works at the University of Texas but has accepted a job in Chile, does embrace views that most of his peers find indefensible. In a 1998 survey, 7.5 percent of physicists and astronomers in the National Academy of Sciences said they believed in God — and many of the believers would still concede that science explains the universe better than a reading of Genesis. Read more at www.nytimes.com

Food or Facebook for America’s Homeless?

Eric Sheptock is fast-becoming America’s next social justice celebrity. An unemployed, recovering crack cocaine addict with an aggressive social media presence, he is likely the only homeless man in America to receive email alerts on press mentions of his name, for which this will no doubt register.

Sheptock, whose presence on Twitter and Facebook has attracted upwards of 5,500 supporters, refuses to accept any job that might interfere with his online advocacy. He has fans, after all, and they like him, they really like him.

The home at which I came of age, in Sylvester, Georgia, was a twenty-five-year-old mobile home found on a dirt road and nestled on leased land between a peanut field and pecan orchard. In that rural Georgia town, where the peanut-to-person ratio was somewhere near 1,000,000 to 1, you worked or you went homeless and hungry.

It was a simple but powerful truth: No one wants to sleep in a peanut field. There was no government aid infrastructure for the rural, overworked and underpaid mother and you can be certain there were no cosmopolitan blue bloods whose sleep that night would be interrupted lest they open their wallet for the disheveled haggards on the street.

Had my mother spent her days advocating for affordable housing — presumably free, unrestricted housing at the expense of taxpayers — and demanding universally free meals, the prospect of food security for her children would have been but a pipe dream. Instead, she did what is expected of responsible adults: She worked, as a teacher’s assistant in the day and house cleaner in the evening.

The compounding social barriers to economic security for America’s poor and homeless has never been greater and the chance to rise above our forebears grows diminished with each successive generation born of poverty and injustice. The great tragedy of our American experience is not an individual’s decision to waste their capacity for success — lost, in some cases, on griping substance abuse, listlessness and even Facebook — but our refusal to demand better of them.

Eric Sheptock has proved he has what it takes; he merely refuses to apply it. That failure is as much his as our own. Read more at www.huffingtonpost.com

Drug used in Okla. execution could gain wider use

MCALESTER, Okla. — Other states could follow Oklahoma’s lead in using a sedative commonly used to euthanize animals in its lethal injection formula because of a nationwide shortage of a key ingredient in the three-drug cocktail, death penalty experts say.

John David Duty is believed to be the first person in the United States whose execution included the use of pentobarbital. The 58-year-old was pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m. Thursday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.

Duty and two other death-row inmates had challenged the state’s decision to use pentobarbital, arguing it could be inhumane because a person could be paralyzed but still aware when a painful third drug is administered to stop the heart. On Tuesday, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling against the other two inmates. Duty did not take part in the appeal.

“No one who has been put to death has come back and testified about what it felt like,” said Rowan, who gathered outside the governor’s mansion in Oklahoma City with about a dozen protesters. The group held a vigil once they learned Duty had been pronounced dead.

Duty pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the 2001 slaying of 22-year-old Curtis Wise. At the time, Duty was serving three life sentences for rape, robbery and shooting with intent to kill.

According to court records, Duty strangled Wise with a sheet. Read more at www.chron.com