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WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — According to a growing number of astronomers, physicists, and major scientific journals, anyone who is not sufficiently pro-LGBTQ+ should be denied a presence in the cosmos.  

There is a movement afoot within NASA to rename the much anticipated, $8.8 billion yet-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Why? As a State Department official in the 1950s, James Webb opposed employing gays and lesbians, viewing them as security risks susceptible to blackmail.      

Webb went on to become in 1961 the head of NASA, where he oversaw the Apollo program.    

Because the race to beat the USSR to the moon was viewed as integral to winning the Cold War, the Apollo program had to be protected against vulnerabilities to Soviet interference.  Webb was responsible for implementing federal policy that included purging gays and lesbians from the NASA workforce.     

LGBT corruption: Making the hard sciences soft, squishy 

The big story, however, is not the manufactured controversy over the naming of a single telescope: It’s the way that LGBT forces are successfully corrupting hard sciences.   

Scientific American magazine has now published two opinion pieces advocating for changing the name of the decades-long JWST project. The most recent article was published jointly with Nature magazine. It’s both ironic and tragic that once venerable mainstream journals devoted to science and nature now overtly reject science and nature in favor of faddish, “woke,” peripheral social justice issues.   

“We felt that we should take a public stand on naming such an important facility after someone whose values were so questionable,” explained the four astronomers behind the renaming move in an email to Nature. “It’s time for NASA to stand up and be on the right side of history.” 

However, it’s hard to imagine how scientists can be on the right side of history while on the wrong side of the laws of both science and nature.  

‘Incredibly creepy’ 

Scientific American regularly publishes articles that are political, not scientific, where LGBT ideology trumps intellectual curiosity, intellectual honesty, and solid research. Recent editorial headlines include Why Anti-Trans Laws Are Anti-Science, A Nationwide Ban Is Needed for “Anti-Gay Therapy,” and Gender-Affirming Health Care Should Be a Right, Not a Crime — all of which belong in the opinion sections of The Advocate or LGBTQ Nation, not a science journal.  

Nature has appended notices to articles and social media postings, declaring, “Nature recognizes that sex and gender are neither binary nor fixed,” or some variation on that theme.   

“What's going on at Nature is worrisome. It is INCREDIBLY creepy that whenever sex comes up, the publication feels the need to print that parenthetical, like some sort of mantra to ward off wrongthink,” tweeted journalist and science writer Jesse Singal.  “This is not normal.” 

“The only explanation for these strange and incorrect statements is ideological capture. These sentences are mantras of gender ideology – an ideology that claims that sex is not a reliable classification for humans. It is too vague, mutable and subjective to talk about reliably. The only reliable classification is ‘gender identity’ – whatever that is,” wrote blogger Andy Lewis.   

“This fashionable nonsense arose out of postmodernist-inspired philosophies in ‘gender studies’ and sociology. As with much of these philosophies, it seeks to undermine meaning in words, to break apart and deny objective knowledge and classifications in an attempt to undermine ‘oppressive power structures,’” explained Lewis. “It is a strictly political philosophy with activist aims that denies science can obtain reliable and objective knowledge and any such claim to knowledge is merely the speech of a dominant and oppressive class – usually white, heterosexual men.” 

Transtronomers 

The name-change petition was launched by the four astronomers, including one who identifies as ‘non-binary,’ an astrophysicist who uses the pronouns ‘she/they,’ and a professor of physics and astronomy who is also a core faculty member in women's and gender studies who identifies as “queer and agender.”  The petition now has amassed 1,250 signatories, according to Nature.   

The authors wrote

Many astronomers feel a debt of gratitude for Webb's work as NASA administrator and are appreciative of and nostalgic for the time during the Apollo program when the space agency thrived. But while appreciation and nostalgia are important, they are not sufficient.  

Webb might have played a positive role at NASA, but his greater legacy beyond the agency is also relevant. Now that we know of Webb's silence at State and his actions at NASA, we think it is time to rename JWST. The name of such an important mission, which promises to live in the popular and scientific psyche for decades, should be a reflection of our highest values. 

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“[T]he night sky is a shared heritage that belongs to all of us, including LGBTQIA+ people. The time for lionizing leaders who acquiesced in a history of harm is over. We should name telescopes out of love for those who came before us and led the way to freedom,” they concluded.   

The American Astronomical Society’s Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA) has published a 69-page guide to “LGBT+ Inclusivity in Physics and Astronomy” that it asserts is “fundamentally a question of cultural transformation,” echoing the language employed by Barack Obama, who promised in 2008 to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Their passion is not science; they aim to remake the world according to rainbow Marxist ideals.  

Woke science is an experiment certain to fail 

“The federal science agencies have absorbed the vocabulary of academic victimology — from ‘intersectionality’ to ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘stereotype threat,’” wrote Heather Mac Donald in a Wall Street Journal commentary titled Woke Science Is an Experiment Certain to Fail

“The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all embraced the idea that science is pervaded by systemic bias that handicaps minorities and women,” continued Mac Donald, author and contributing editor at City Journal. “Those agencies have taken on the job of extirpating such inequity on the theory that scientific advancement depends on a ‘diverse’ scientific workforce.” 

‘Wokeness’ is making war on science and math, an attack on scientific principles 

“When it comes to wokeness, we are way past logic or consistency. We are in a world where everything is racist and oppressive and patriarchal — not just the theories developed by white men, but in scientific principles themselves,” observed Dan Hannan in a Washington Examiner opinion titled “Wokeness is making war on science — and even math.” 

Hannan explained that even Oxford University’s hard science departments have become “woke,” hiring a team of students “to diversify and ‘decolonize’ its STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering, and math.” 

He called the move an “attack on scientific principles.”  

“The essence of identity politics is that feelings trump facts, that ‘lived experience’ matters more than empirical data,” said Hannan.

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Doug Mainwaring is a journalist for LifeSiteNews, an author, and a marriage, family and children's rights activist.  He has testified before the United States Congress and state legislative bodies, originated and co-authored amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court, and has been a guest on numerous TV and radio programs.  Doug and his family live in the Washington, DC suburbs.