Virgin Birth

The County of Arlington is gearing up, once again, to embrace the ranked-choice method for elections of County Board candidates, at least ostensibly to permit voters in the most educated, by credentials, municipality, in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia, ranked 14th for holders of graduate degrees, and home of the most government scientists, who are credited with the warp speed delivery of the safe and effective vaccines, and yet, quite ironically, with only 32% of residents having any religious affiliation at all, Arlington County empirically ranks as the locality with the least amount of religious faith in the entire country, and perhaps feeding their embrace of publicly funded schools over what empirically is a far superior choice in private or parochial education, where students perform much better in both reading and math, and where significant shifts have been found amongst disadvantaged students and children in a pervasive and persistent achievement gap. Yet, with over 70% having been administered the Pfizer, the Moderna or the Janssen product, they will tell you that they are data-driven and follow the science.
And, when it comes to education, at least these days, in Virginia’s second best public schools, where they had only begun taking daily attendance after Barack Obama had been elected, the priority message heard in almost every communication from the Arlington Public School Board is about the celebration of their core community values, arguably within the domain and province, under the Establishment Clause that had erected a wall of separation between church and state, while, at least according to progressive Chief Justice Earl Warren, in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local government”, and “such an opportunity, where the state has provided it, should be made available to all on equal terms”.
Congressman Don Beyer, a member of the Free Thought Caucus, what has been described as the atheist club in Congress, joining his colleague Eleanor Holmes Norton, at the invitation of Jared Huffman and Jamie Raskin, had been expressing signs of frustration with conservative politicians who had twisted the Bible to promote what he had described as bad policies. And, although he is a graduate of the elite Williams College, and an alumnus of Gonzaga High School, a college preparatory curriculum provided by the Jesuits, has suggested that he had been harmed by his rearing in Catholicism and parochial education, and, today, is proud that his four children have rejected God, church and religion, a winning message in 2022, among over 75% of voters in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District, the most reliable Democrat Party District in the entire state that had recorded the greatest gains for Democrats, as many as six points, during the controversial presidential election in 2016, raising the partisan voting index to D+21.
While today the focus of values training in the Arlington Public Schools is touted to be diversity and inclusion, gravitating around issues such as family life education, participation in sports outside a child’s biologically determined sex and gender, and respecting a child’s preferences in personal pronouns, even though, during the pandemic closures of public schools Virginia had experienced the adverse outcome of being ranked sixth in the nation for declines in math and reading scores, at least at Jesuit, college preparatory high schools, students, as early as freshman year would immerse themselves in philosophical discussions to prepare them for later life, often revolving around what are described by ethicists as moral dilemmas, as presented in a world in which there is rarely a clean, dualistic reality of right and wrong, or black and white, but rather often filled with ambiguity, uncertainty, and shades of gray, and as experienced by characters in classic films, like Eli Kazan’s On the Water Front and David Lean’s Bridge over the River Kwai.
So, for the next few minutes, we shall delve into values instruction as taught in parochial schools, if only to provide a comparison, and, engaged in the praxis, exploring an application of contemporary significance, using the recent pandemic as a practical example.
Aboard the stricken aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, Captain Brett Crozier, a graduate of Annapolis, had urgently dispatched an SOS to senior level flag officers, circumventing his chain of command, suggesting that his situation required a political solution, and lamenting that his situation was not ideal, and, at least many notable evolutionary biologists, and Doctor Anthony Fauci, the most trusted voice for separating fact from fiction in the pandemic, have argued that the most likely scenario for the origins of COVID-19 was in a natural spillover from an animal source to a human, absent any moral or ethical considerations, and very clean, a hypothesis for the proximal origins that less than a third of Americans, generally less educated, had rejected, at the beginning of the global public health crisis, perhaps driven by a concern that if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is, and you look like an intelligent person.
However, taken from this secularly virgin birth, we can imagine a situation in which scientific and policy experts are confronted with an emerging paradigm shift that has disrupted violently the status quo, and researchers as the Data Institute for the University of San Francisco have reported that just epidemics are historically associated with times of fear, confusion and despair, and the next steps, having been caught by surprise, for the first time in this scenario human actors are faced with decisions of moral, legal and tangible consequences, answering the question: what do you do now?
What is the first problem? Perhaps a wounded pride for being caught with their pants down, which could filter into decision-making, causing some to be more cautious, but others, in panic, and in fear of being found out, pushing ahead boldly to recover from past mistakes, and even the sagacious Doctor Benjamin Franklin had noted how haste makes waste.
Leaders and scientists in this scenario have almost a public duty to provide assurances to the public, and here there may be some temptation to paint a rosy picture of intelligence, even though even General Lloyd Austin, today the Defense Secretary, had said you can’t win a war by rosying up intelligence, when he had been commander of the U.S. Army’s CENTCOM.
If, as suggested, the science is evolving, is there a temptation to overstate the effectiveness of measures that have not been used before against a novel coronavirus in a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic? If I am a developer of a new product solution, is there an incentive to overstate the capabilities of my product in salesmanship? If the measures we assured the public would work had, in fact, failed, would we be honest enough to just come forward with the truth? Before this global public health crisis, that found as many as 24% of atheists praying for a solution, over 73% of Americans, regardless of party, did not trust the government to do the right thing, and over 66% did not even trust one another, according to the Pew Research Foundation, and do you believe that the evolutionary pressure of a pandemic had altered that assessment of reality? At least according to Doctor Anthony Fauci, this virus has fooled us before, while Doctor Rochelle Walensky has noted how this virus isn’t stupid, while human choices have not been our friend. And you look like an intelligent person.