As of the last time I checked, @NSBPInc President-Elect Hak…

"The...article references a professional astrophysicist as his original source for learning about the allegations against Webb. This scientist propagated unsubstantiated false information as if it were true without performing proper scientific rigor to investigate its veracity."

This comment specifically cites an article on https://t.co/5MxzND1CGW by Matthew Francis where Francis says that he first learned about the allegations against Webb because of me. Francis does not identify me as an authority nor does he quote me as an authoritative source.

I believe that what Francis was (quite reasonably) referring to is seeing me tweet The Stranger article by Dan Savage.

Oluseyi takes it a step further by insinuating that I knowingly made false statements and claiming that I did not investigate.

Oluseyi has no evidence.

Again, I want to highlight that the president elect of the National Society of Black Physicists wrote an essay, claiming to support queer people, where he makes a point of impugning the integrity of the only openly queer faculty member in the org, who is also early career.

Oluseyi did not approach me with his concerns. He did not reach out to me with a correction to my tweets about this. (that I should have said State Dept instead of NASA might have been fair!)

Instead he chose a public attack on me and frankly, on Matt Francis as a journalist.

Oluseyi’s essay is in my opinion homophobic, and I do not believe he should be leading an organization like @nsbpinc that includes a growing queer student and other early career researcher population. That’s just my opinion though. The board/membership will do what it wants.

Next I want to turn to the larger astro comm, including NASA folks who circulated this piece:
1. As @RocketToLulu outlines with support from @ColdWarScience and @adrianlucy, the history side of piece is poorly researched. Were you competent to evaluate it?
https://t.co/BapaMCtvLw

2. It’s clear some of you circulated it without reading the whole thing carefully because if you had, you would have noticed the pointed personal comments. Surely you know those would be inappropriate in a scientific paper, right? Why didn’t he include a name? This is a red flag.

3. The desire to exonerate a dead white guy who was in the thick of federal governance during the McCarthy Era should give all of you pause. Like, seriously. If he had been a radical freedom fighter, he wouldn’t have been in the Truman administration. Learn some history.

4. The silence over the last two days as the homophobia and damaging personal attacks in the piece were made clear is grotesque, homophobia, and misogynoir. A lot of you have left us to address the homophobia alone and me to address the misogynoir by myself.

Shame on you. SHAME.

I feel compelled to say especially to the hetcis astronomers that this is particularly shameful because I am now on day 4 of using up time addressing this, as is Lucianne. And Adrian is a student who is in their final year!

Science time has been stolen from queer people by you.

As of the last time I checked, @NSBPInc President-Elect Hakeem Oluseyi’s blog entry that seeks to exonerate homophobic federal admin James Webb still contains what I consider to be potentially libelous comments about me, one of the only openly queer faculty in the organization.

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