Essay:My Letter to a Bigot

Some background: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Dear John Aravosis,

Congratulations on spearheading the successful effort to remove an accomplished scientist from the committee assembled to mitigate the effects of the oil spill due to remarks he made that are unrelated to the task of the group.

The insecurity of you and your followers has resulted in the removal of an exceptional problem solver from a position where he could have done a lot of good. You have shown that you value the suppression of those who choose to express opinions that contradict your own- and who illuminate facts that you want people to ignore- over the potential to hasten the cleanup of an ecological disaster.

While I'm sure you would claim that you advocate acceptance, your actions show otherwise. Professor Katz has published 128 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and conferences on some of the most difficult and interesting issues facing modern science. He has written textbooks accepted for publication by Addison-Wesley and the Oxford University Press, publishers who hold their authors to extremely high standards. If you could have placed your prejudices aside for just a few minutes, you would have read the solutions he puts forth on his website to problems such earthquake safety in impoverished areas, and sickness caused by toxic drywall. You have chosen to ignore Professor Katz's obvious fitness relating to the task faced by the group, and instead favored that a totally irrelevant evaluation be used by the government to decide whether to further utilize his services. Don't people like you claim to advocate the evaluation of one's abilities and blindness to all other traits when employees are being hired? I guess such an ideology should only remain in place as long as it does not benefit people who are too different from yourself.

Your foaming hatred of any opinion that contradicts your own seems to justify outright dishonesty in your mind and the minds of your followers. I have seen bloggers write that one of his pages is in place for the purpose of insulting people with disabilities, when in reality he is merely advocating the idea that people with minor mental deficiencies should be held to the same standard that everyone else is held to in academic environments (or that extra time they are given to complete tests is accompanied by a mark on their transcripts reflecting the fact that they were evaluated differently). On your very blog, you claim that he denies the existence of climate change, when in reality he acknowledges the existence of the greenhouse effect at the very beginning of the article to which you refer (the article's thesis is that history shows that global warming may not necessarily be a bad thing. Are you a liar or are you just too damn stupid to realize that?). Your entire campaign against him and open discourse in general is grounded in dishonesty. Whether it is due to your own incompetence in the art of debate or due to the inherent flaws in your ideology, your method is to silence and attack the careers of people who disagree with you instead of making any attempt to refute their arguments beyond petty name calling and lying.

The Gulf of Mexico and this country would be better off without people like you. No, I'm not referring to homosexuals, but to mental lightweights who hate diversity of ideas enough to consider the removal of a great mind from a project where he could have done a lot of good to be acceptable collateral damage. Again, congratulations.

-[perhaps putting my name here was a bad idea, what with homosexual activists' habit of going after the careers of people they disagree with]