Global warming debunker/homophobe booted from BP cleanup team

from Business Week:

"Jonathan I. Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis., said he was fired from the team of scientists chosen by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu to help BP Plc control the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“ 'Some of Professor Katz’s controversial writings have become a distraction from the critical work of addressing the oil spill,' Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said in an e-mail today. 'Professor Katz will no longer be involved in the department’s efforts.' ”

Some of Katz' writing inspired a petition effort to get him replaced on the team. In an essay titled "In Defense of Homophobia", Katz described homophobia as "a moral judgement upon acts engaged in by choice." Ironically, he follows this up with a statement of solidarity with those who are homophobic on the basis of religion -- also a 'choice': "if you are religious, you probably agree with the homophobic position, because most major religions make this moral judgement." Katz follows this up with a 'history' of AIDS:

the modern AIDS epidemic began suddenly about 1980. Its first victims were promiscuous homosexual males; it was initially called ``Gay-Related Immune Deficiency''.

In America attitudes towards homosexuality changed in the 1970's. It went from a private, furtively practiced, vice to an open and accepted subculture. In many circles, ``sodomite'' ceased to be an insult. This acceptance led to the toleration, and wide practice, of gross homosexual promiscuity. HIV, falling onto that fertile soil, made the AIDS epidemic. Even before AIDS was recognized, practicing homosexuals were notorious for a high rate of venereal diseases.

Katz does distinguish between "innocent" AIDS casualties and the "not so innocent" ones:

There are many completely innocent victims, too: hemophiliacs (a substantial fraction died as a result of contaminated clotting factor), recipients of contaminated transfusions, and their spouses and children, for AIDS can be transmitted heterosexually (in America, only infrequently) and congenitally. . . . Guilt for their deaths is on the hands of the homosexuals and intravenous drug abusers who poisoned the blood supply. These people died so the sodomites could feel good about themselves.

Jonathan "global warming is good for humanity" Katz

Ironically, the "expert" that Obama was planning to engage in addressing an environmental disaster thinks that the impact of human activities on climate change is no big deal:

Some of the more apocalyptic fears about global warming resemble a secular doomsday cult. Rather than God dooming mankind for its traditional sins (robbery, lust, murder, disbelief, etc.), Nature is said to doom mankind for the secular sin of carbon emission. Some (Greenpeace, and even more radical groups) think any human effect on nature to be sinful, and regard "Mother Earth" as a deity that is violated by any use of its resources for the sustenance, comfort or betterment of Mankind. Needless to say, this is opposite to the Biblical grant of the natural world to Man for his benefit.
 
Predictions of climate doom are no more rational than traditional religious predictions of a Day of Judgement or Armageddon. Divine revelation is not open to rational argument, and its truth can only be judged by further revelation.

Global warming is real and much of it is probably anthropogenic. Nothing serious will be done about it, no matter how frantic or hysterical certain people become. Fortunately, global warming is probably good for humanity. Sit back, relax, and watch it happen.

Not surprisingly, the conservative chatterers have already gone ballistic over this, tossing about references to "censorship", "free speech" and the First Amendment. It isn't certain how any of them would have reacted had the gays' "fierce advocate" in the White House hired a "proud white supremacist" or "proud anti-Semite". And, for that matter, whether an 'expert' who thinks that global warming, whether human-caused or otherwise, would be "good for humanity" would belong on this crew in particular.