That is a B.S. argument. NCSE was involved in the situation and if your explanation was true, would have had no business in contacting the Smithsonian about a publication by another entity located in Washington State.
The NCSE is headquartered in California, not Washington State.
It still has nothing to do with the fact that nothing untoward happened to Sternberg. All the hype and bad press is of his doing. In his effort to play the persecuted at the SI he actually blew up administrative minutiae to look like a personal attack on himself, and obviously people bought it. In general, it’s good to make sure you have a clean record before you start calling persecution, and Sternberg had far from a clean record. Yet quite the opposite of being punished for nothing, absolutely nothing was done to him for his transgressions.