First off, as this column is appearing on December 24th, please let me wish you all a very Merry Christmas on this Christmas Eve!

When I sat down to write this holiday column, I first thought that I might write about a very interesting story in Colorado Politics in which we learn that a federal judge has asked some constructions companies to explain why, exactly, they think they can challenge the Denver vaccine mandate. But I’m guessing that both my long-suffering editors as well as you kindly readers are getting pretty sick of news stories about the pandemic. That doesn’t make the story in question unimportant, but I’m getting really tired of people demanding a “right” to not get a shot that saves lives. Heck, even Donald Trump himself got booed – yes, that’s what happened – when he told an audience he had gotten the booster shot.

So, I thought about writing a column expressing, yet again, my frustration with the anti-vax crowd and their reckless behavior. Double heck, a police chief (yup, a police chief) in a small North Carolina town just got himself suspended for telling his officers where they could get a fake vaccine card, so that they could keep their jobs while still avoiding the actual vaccine.

But I’m not going to talk about any of that…

Instead, I’m going to tell you something rather shocking.

I’m, well, a nerd.

I know, I know, that is hard to believe given my dashing good looks and over-the-top modesty, but I am in fact a full blown, total nerd. I love science and I own two different semi-large telescopes. For many years I have been active in my local astronomy club, and once when we had some scopes set up for attendees at the annual Space Symposium, Bill Nye the science guy actually looked at Mars through my scope. So, yeah, my nerd credentials are pretty solid.

Which is why my eye was caught by a news story about a truly nerdy undertaking, the launch this very day of the James Webb Space Telescope. By the time you read these words, you will know if the launch was successful and if the Webb is on its way to its final position, roughly a million miles away from the Earth.

The Webb is an amazing machine with a very odd history. The thing is massive – far larger than the now-30-year-old Hubble space telescope that has been sending back astonishing images for decades. The Webb has a vastly larger set of mirrors, and those mirrors are to be shaded from sunlight by a set of five tennis court-sized thin sheets of ultra-think space-age material that will let this amazing telescope peer back in time, essentially, to pick up the faintest bits of light that came from when the universe was formed roughly 14.3 billion years ago. It is a technological marvel.

It is also years late and way over budget.

If you read the story noted above, you can follow the history of this troubled spacecraft, originally budgeted at about a billion dollars and scheduled to launch in 2010. Now, as the scope is hopefully zipping through space, it is a decade late and cost about $10 billion. There are books to be written about that process. The science will be awesome, but politics should be studied too.

But there is another aspect of the Webb that I want to talk about with you, and that is the actual name of the spacecraft. Now, if you have been a space nerd as long as I have, you know the name James Webb. I’ve loved the space program since I was a little kid, and my dad (bless his heart) took me to see the launch of the Apollo 15 mission to the moon. And at the center of much of the Apollo moon program was Mr. Webb. After serving in the State Department under President Truman, Webb ultimately became the NASA administrator who oversaw our lunar program. And while hundreds of thousands of people contributed to the Apollo program, few were as impactful as Webb.

And so, back when the telescope was first considered and approved by NASA, it seemed like a good idea to honor Webb’s many contributions, in the same way that the Hubble honors a distinguished American astronomer.

But back in 2015 a few people began to object to naming this new wonder after Webb. It seems that back when Webb was in the State Department in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was perhaps involved – but was at least complicit – in what was called the “Lavender Scare,” that was an effort to expose and expel gay men and lesbians from government jobs. Thousands were driven out of public service, and while Webb’s direct involvement is unclear, he certainly knew about it and even discussed it with President Truman.

While at NASA, Webb was a champion of hiring and promoting more women and blacks within the space organization, but his role at the State Department is still troubling, and to some, should be disqualifying from the honor of a spacecraft name.

As is all too often the case, I don’t know what is, in fact, the right thing to do here.

We as a nation will have to find some way to evaluate the range of unacceptable behaviors. Should a single poorly chosen joke, for example, be a career ender? Certainly, there is a range of vile behaviors that runs from a stupid comment all the way up to actual physical violence, and our judicial system accepts that there is a range of punishments for such actions, from none (free speech) to life in prison. I personally would have thought sexual assault would most certainly cause the voters to reject a candidate for president, especially when he bragged about it on an audio tape, but I was wrong.

And so, when considering the totality of James Webb’s career, shall we disqualify him from any honors because in his days at the State Department he was at least complicit in loutish and vile behavior? Or do future good deeds in some way mitigate earlier transgressions? 

Frankly, I don’t know.

But we as a nation must find a way forward in which we properly adjudicate – even if only in the court of public opinion – the totality of a person’s behaviors.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.