Lawrence Krauss is a renowned theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author. He, like so many others in the sciences, is an atheist; in fact, he has written articles seeking to undermine others’ belief in God, calling religious faith “foolish” and “dangerous.”
At the end of last month, Krauss wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that sought to dismantle a different kind of dogma: the secular canon of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Leading out of the gate with a provocative headline — “A Scientist’s Sexuality Shouldn’t Matter” — Krauss sends leftists to their fainting couches in droves by suggesting that the federal government’s collection of certain demographic data among postgraduate science students is unnecessary.
Krauss admits that the federal government’s measuring of demographic data on individuals pursuing careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields served its purpose at one point.
“The sex and race data—the latter has been collected since 1975—was initially useful in efforts to overcome barriers to women and minorities in academia,” he writes. “Those barriers have largely disappeared, yet quotas and preferential hiring have persisted.”
Krauss points out that the National Science Foundation (NSF), the federal agency compiling all this information, is strongly committed to identity politics, even at a time when the Supreme Court will most likely strike down race-based university admission policies.
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He writes:
A pilot project was announced last week to track “sexual orientation and gender identity.” In addition to being asked about their sex—now qualified as the sex “assigned at birth”—they will be asked if they “currently describe” themselves as male, female, “transgender” or “a different term”; whether they consider themselves a “gender minority,” a “sexual minority” and “LGBT+”; and whether they accept one of a dizzying list of labels: “Non-binary, Gender nonconforming, Genderfluid, Genderqueer . . . Gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer or another orientation.”
Not only is this information irrelevant, Krauss asserts, but it’s also a violation of privacy. A person’s sexual proclivities have no bearing on whether he or she is a good scientist — especially in light of the fact that these LGBTQ identities are a small minority of the population in general.
Krauss states that he has worked with many gay scientists in his day but that their sexual identity didn’t matter because they got the work done and didn’t make sexual orientation a focus of that work. He then wonders what the NSF’s emphasis on sexual identity is supposed to lead to, quoting the NSF’s Charles Barber stating that asking students about their sexual proclivities “gives us an opportunity to create more opportunities and broaden participation to yield equitable outcomes for the LGBTQIA+ community and others.”
Krauss wonders whether this sudden emphasis on sexual minorities will lead to quotas, but he also asks, “If so, how would one even go about determining the ‘correct’ proportion of ‘queer’ or ‘genderqueer’ scientists? The percentage of the population that espouses these labels is so small that any data the NSF gathers will be statistically useless.”
Dr. Albert Mohler believes that the surveys will lead to quotas. He says in his analysis of Krauss’ op-ed that the federal government “intends to put [the data] to use, and that use is of political use. So it’ll come down to quotas or something very, very similar. Lawrence Krauss is also basically arguing in this article that many of the categories used here are not even meaningful in the face of science.”
And if the NSF is so worried about making sure we have enough LGBTQ cultists in the sciences, what about other minority groups among scientists? Krauss addresses this question, too.
“If the NSF is going to ask doctoral candidates about sexual orientation or gender identification, why not ask them about other private matters, such as religion or politics? Those would likely yield demographically skewed results as well. Atheists and Jews are surely overrepresented among scientists; conservatives and evangelical Christians underrepresented. I wonder what the DEI officers would make of that.”
Oof. Talk about some harsh words from an avowed anti-theist who’s probably also of the left.
Of course, we all know what’s really going on here. The Rainbow Mafia is the squeakiest wheel these days — Krauss calls them “the loudest new minorities” — and the left in general and the Biden administration in particular are hellbent on pandering to the LGBTQ crowd. Nothing else matters to the far-left bureaucrats, and kudos to Krauss for pointing it out.
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