A few days before Christmas Eve 2019, the Christian Lawyers Association announced on its Twitter account that it plans to sue Netflix for portraying Jesus Christ as homosexual in the movie “The First Temptation of Christ.” One of the responses they received was, “But if she’s going everywhere with twelve hunchbacks and their best friend, how can she not be porridge?” That tweet was from a COPE networker who belongs to the Episcopal Conference, and it cost him his job. Now it is the Supreme Court that has confirmed that the dismissal is invalid and that the bishops’ department is obliged to reinstate him in its staff.
The tweet was written by this employee of the radio station’s sound department on December 22 of the same year. Christian lawyers announced this sued NetflixCrime against religious sentiments for the filmThe first temptation of Christ“, in which Brazilian Gregorio Duvivier brings to life the homosexual Jesus of Nazareth in the comedy. A court battle in Spain, preceded by a worldwide ultra-Catholic attack on the film, which included Ban the movie in Brazil and Molotov cocktail attack As is known, the producer watching TV.
Five days after the tweet, the employee received a termination letter. The message he wrote, he said, was “offensive, sexist and disgusting” and, moreover, it went against COPE’s ideology. He also breached the station’s “Decalogue of Good Practice on Social Media” and earned the “most serious breach” dismissal. The Decalogue exhorts workers, among other things, to avoid “opinions contrary to the values ​​of the home.”
The Social Court of Madrid heard that the dismissal was invalid and this was confirmed by the Supreme Court of Justice a year ago. The judges ruled that the employee was fired for “lawful exercise of a fundamental right to free speech” without the station being able to prove “any wrongdoing that would justify the dismissal,” causing him to be voided and required to be reinstated. In addition to paying you unpaid processing wages while you were not with the company.
“Neither the ideology nor the decalogue of good practice are mandatory standards for the staff working in COPE,” the TSJM judges recalled. In addition, this employee was not a journalist, but a sound technician, and finally, on his personal Twitter account, he was not identified as an employee of Bishops Station. Thus, his tweet “must fall within the freedom of expression that anyone can exercise in accordance with the Constitution,” the magistrates said.
COPE appealed and now, as elDiario.es has learned, the Supreme Court rejected its appeal in a decree dated November. The inadmissibility signed by the judges with the consent of the prosecution before the comparison, which the company tried to convince that the worker’s tweet about Jesus Christ justified his dismissal: he argued in his appeal that the Constitutional Court upheld the sentence last year. Councilor from Cataroha (Valencia) for insulting the late Khariri, Victor Barrio.
The deeds of the bullfighter and Jesus Christ
This punishment, which derives from civil jurisdiction, is what brought COPE to the table as a counterpoint to social sector-led dismissals. In May 2021, the Constitutional Court guaranteed that Datsu Perris, then a councilor in the Valencian city of Cataroya, was sentenced to 7,000 euros in compensation for the family of Victor Barrio, a bullfighter who died in the bullring of Teruel in 2016. .
The reason for the compensation was calling the bullfighter a “murderer” on social media, a punishment that was eventually upheld by the Constitutional Court and which, according to COPE, served to justify the firing of its worker for joking that he was Jesus Christ. homosexual. “There is no inconsistency between the compared sentences,” the Supreme Court said in rejecting the bishops’ appeal. It does not contribute, the judges scold, “new or relevant elements in this regard” to his appeal, and they declare the dismissal firm invalid.
The order of the Supreme Court, in which Juan Molins is the speaker, also sets a penalty of 300 euros for COPE. Throughout the trial, the courts faulted the company for attempting to launch a “prospective” investigation into the employee’s activities on Twitter, offering to provide his last six months of tweets, as well as the user’s deletion.
The TSJM recalled that in any event, it should have been the COPE that would have confirmed the worker’s violations and not the other way around. “Prospective” investigations, recalls the Social Chamber of the Court of Madrid, are prohibited, in this case requesting data “that are not considered relevant to the prosecution of the facts”.
Source: El Diario
