A few days before Christmas Eve 2019, the Christian Lawyers Association announced on its Twitter account that it was going to sue Netflix for showing Jesus Christ as homosexual in the movie ‘The First Temptation of Christ’. One of the responses they received stated: “But if he went everywhere with twelve hunks and his best friend, how can he not be a fagot.” That tweet was from a worker at the COPE chain, owned by the Episcopal Conference, and it cost him his job. Now it has been the Supreme Court that has confirmed that the dismissal was void and that the bishops’ station is obliged to reinstate him to its staff.
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The tweet was written by this worker from the radio station’s sound department on December 22 of that year. Christian Lawyers had announced that sued Netflixbrandishing a crime against religious feelings, for the film ‘The first temptation of Christ‘, in which the Brazilian Gregório Duvivier gives life in comedy to a homosexual Jesus of Nazareth. A judicial controversy in Spain that was preceded by a worldwide ultra-Catholic offensive against the film, which included the film ban in Brazil and Molotov cocktail attacks to the producer, as reported watch TV.
Five days after the tweet, the worker received the dismissal letter. The message he had written, he said, was “insulting, sexist and vexatious” and, furthermore, it went against the ideology of COPE. He was also in breach of the station’s “Decalogue of Good Practices in Social Networks” and deserved dismissal for being a “most serious offense.” A decalogue in which workers are urged, among other things, to avoid “opinions that contradict the values of the House.”
A social court in Madrid understood that the dismissal was void and this was confirmed by the Superior Court of Justice a year ago. The judges confirmed that this worker was dismissed for “legitimately exercising his fundamental right to freedom of expression” without the station being able to prove “any breach that would justify the dismissal”, which led to his annulment and the obligation to reinstate him, in addition to to pay you uncollected processing wages while you were away from the company.
“Neither the ideology nor the decalogue of good practices are mandatory standards for the personnel who work for COPE,” recalled the TSJM judges. In addition, this worker was not a journalist but a sound technician and, finally, in his private Twitter account he was not identified as a member of the staff of the bishops’ station. His tweet, therefore, “must be framed within the scope of freedom of opinion that everyone can exercise according to the Constitution,” the magistrates settled.
COPE appealed and now, as elDiario.es has learned, the Supreme Court has rejected its appeal through an order dated November. An inadmissibility signed by the judges with the approval of the Prosecutor’s Office before the comparison with 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 confirmed last year the sentence of a councilor from Catarroja (Valencia) for insulting the deceased bullfighter Víctor Barrio.
The cases of the bullfighter and Jesus Christ
This sentence, coming from the civil jurisdiction, was the one that put COPE on the table as a contrast in a dismissal case managed by the social sector. In May 2021, the Constitutional Court guaranteed that Datxu Perris, then a councilor in the Valencian town of Catarroja, was sentenced to pay 7,000 euros in compensation to the family of the bullfighter Víctor Barrio, who died from a goring in the Teruel bullring in 2016.
The reason for the compensation was for having called the bullfighter a “murderer” on social networks, a sentence that was ultimately endorsed by the Constitutional Court and which, according to COPE, served to justify the dismissal of his worker for joking that Jesus Christ was homosexual. “The contradiction between the compared sentences is non-existent,” says the Supreme Court to reject the appeal of the bishops’ station. It does not contribute, the judges reproach, “novel or relevant elements in this regard” in its appeal and they declare the nullity of the dismissal firm.
The order of the Supreme Court, with Juan Molins as speaker, also establishes a sentence of costs of 300 euros for COPE. Throughout the judicial process, the courts have reproached the company for trying to initiate a “prospective” investigation into the activity of this worker on Twitter, proposing that his tweets from the last six months be provided, as well as those deleted by the user.
The TSJM recalled that, in any case, it had to be the COPE that would prove the worker’s breaches and not the other way around. The “prospective” investigations, recalled the social chamber of the Madrid court, are prohibited, in this case requesting data “that are not considered relevant for the prosecution of the facts.”
