[DanAndersen]

>Galileo was hung for what he said.

I get the point of what you are saying (that times in the past have had very extreme responses to people stating things that were accurate but unpopular), but Galileo was not hung or even executed. He was placed under house arrest (the trouble he got into was also more about stepping on the Church's domain of interpreting Scripture rather than astronomical facts, but that's a tangential popular misconception).