NASA Rejects Petition to Rename James Webb Telescope that Leftist Call ‘The Homophobic Telescope’

For the last several years wokesters have been attacking the James Webb Space Telescope, calling it the “Homophobic Telescope” because its namesake, NASA administrator James Webb was outed as having spoken against homosexuality back in the 1950s.

NASA, though, has rejected a new petition that had demanded that the space agency delete James Webb’s name from the device.

The petition attacked Webb as a homophobe:

The historical record is already clear: under Webb’s leadership, queer people were persecuted. Those who would excuse Webb’s failure of leadership cannot simultaneously award him credit for his management of Apollo. Leaders are responsible not only for the actions of those they lead, but the climate they create within their spheres of influence. As we have noted previously, Webb’s legacy of leadership is complicated at best, and at worst, complicit with persecution.

The time has come to choose a future that is inspiring to all of us. We demand that NASA immediately rename JWST, and bestow this honor on someone whose legacy befits a telescope whose data will be used in discoveries that will inspire future generations of astronomers, discoveries that we the undersigned will make.

The controversy has swirled around the name of the telescope at least since 2015 when woke activist Dan Savage published an article smearing Webb and pushing the idea of renaming the telescope.

According to the wokesters, during Webb’s leadership of NASA, gay employee Clifford Norton was fired in 1963 because he was outed as gay. He was also reportedly interrogated by NASA’s head of security over “gay activities.”

No proof has ever been presented that Webb had a hand in the firing or even knew about this incident. But since it happened when he headed the agency, people feel that is reason enough to dump him from the agency’s history.

There is some speculation that NASA has ignored the petition because the Webb telescope project — which is set to replace the aging Hubble telescope — is already 14 years behind schedule and the agency just wants it finished without controversies. The telescope is supposed to launch into space in December.

https://flagandcross.com/nasa-rejects-petition-to-rename-james-webb-telescope-that-leftist-call-the-homophobic-telescope/

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UK: Shouldn’t progressives be in favour of people wanting to speak their mind?

Where once the left fought the bosses in the workers’ name, today its loudest voices lobby bosses to police workers. If you are trying to understand why this section of the left is hated, its authoritarianism is a large part of the answer. In the popular imagination, “progressives” are people who tell you what to say and how to say it and will demand your employer fires you if you refuse. The bossy left has become the bosses’ left.

Their predecessors had a trade unionist mentality. They instinctively sided with the employee against the employer whether they agreed with the employee’s politics or not. The new left understands that real power lies with management in societies such as the UK and US, where unions barely exist in the private sector. Their emblematic radical is not a strike leader or a feminist agitator but a diversity consultant who convinces HR to pay her or him to berate staff who cannot argue back.

It’s a cliche to say that modern institutions live in fear of the “woke mob”. I’m sure the fear exists, but it is hardly debilitating. Progressives pay the corporate elite a compliment by acknowledging that power lies with CEOs. Indeed, they heighten corporate control by giving managers a new right to regulate political beliefs and minor linguistic failings.

Bosses must be grateful for the escape progressives offer them from their responsibilities. If an organisation is dominated by white people, or underpays women, its managers must be to blame. When the Centre for Social Investigation at Oxford University found that applicants with names that marked them as members of an ethnic minority were far less likely to receive a positive response from employers than applicants with traditional white British names, it concluded the unconscious bias and micro-aggressions the diversity consultants are determined to stamp out were irrelevant. What held ethnic minorities back was the “overt and conscious racism” of people at the top, with the power to hire and fire.

As it is a familiar experience for contacts to tell me in confidence that they are frightened of speaking their minds, while pretending in public that nothing is wrong, the canard that cancel culture does not exist needs to be tackled.

Last week, an inquiry for the UK’s sports councils described how athletes and administrators had been reduced to “swearing, shouting, crying and anxiety” by the demand that they admit trans competitors with the physical advantages that male puberty confers to women’s sports.

They thought that fair and safe competition would be impossible but “were afraid to say in public what they privately believed”. The researchers spoke of athletes who “had been threatened with sanction or disciplinary action if they spoke out”. Many were with sporting agencies that adopted leftish positions and “felt they had no option but to remain silent in order to keep their job”. What kind of twisted progressive politics leaves tearful sportswomen frightened of speaking their minds? And what kind of delusional progressive politician believes the public will vote for it?

The Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed was honoured last month by Index on Censorship for taking on his university authorities when he insisted on a clear and liberal definition of free speech. In a secret ballot, dons gave overwhelming support to his proposals that academics and students should be free to disagree in the most robust terms as long as they “tolerated” each other and did not seek to ban or intimidate opponents. Before his motion could be debated, however, Ahmed had to persuade 25 academics to second it. He told me it took six weeks to find colleagues willing to face the career risks an open endorsement of intellectual freedom would bring.

Fear works. You normalise an idea by making opponents afraid to contradict you. If all that were being attempted were the co-option of private companies, state bureaucracies, academia, publishing, the arts and the liberal media into a serious campaign against racism and misogyny, most progressives would say the ends justify the means and move on. But – and surely I do not need to spell this out – when the means include the suppression of debate you open the door to every variety of grifter and fanatic. Employees and children are forced to take scientifically worthless implicit bias tests. Progressive institutions are too scared to defend the material reality of biological sex difference, without which the theory of evolution, with its emphasis on sexual selection, could not exist. Like creationists, they have locked themselves into anti-Darwinian obscurantism. But unlike the religious right, they cannot claim that God made them do it.

Institutions and activists feed off each other. Institutions fear denunciations from activists if they do not censor or sack. Activists fear denunciation from more radical activists if they do not push their demands to the extreme. Institutions have no incentive to resist because the organisations that might once have tempered their power have fallen silent or switched sides.

The University and College Union advised academics to vote against defending their own intellectual freedom at Cambridge. Its leaders did not worry that they had lost touch with their members when they ignored their recommendations. The Society of Authors’ mission statement says it will “oppose in the strongest terms any attempt to stifle or control the author’s voice whether by censorship, imprisonment, execution, hate speech or trolling”. Yet when JK Rowling faced waves of murder and rape threats, its chair, Joanne Harris, said that, although she did not approve, we should shed few tears for Rowling. “People with power, money and influence do not experience the same effect from online abuse as those with less power,” she opined as she diminished the threats of violence routine for women in public life.

The maintenance of the progressive consensus overcomes all other principles. As I said, fear works but only if all institutions play along. Anyone who wishes the Conservatives gone must worry that the Tory party will soon say that it at least does not think “women” is a dirty word and it will not allow workers to be punished for speaking out of turn.

No Twitter mob or HR exec can monitor voters. In the privacy of the polling booth, no one can hear them scream.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/02/if-labour-is-afraid-to-fight-those-who-stifle-free-speech-it-will-pay-dearly

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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