SHOCK: Isaac Katz, Son Of ‘Proud Bigot’ Professor Jonathan Katz, Comes Out
Isaac Katz, the son of Washington University physics professor and notorious bigot Jonathan Katz, is gay. And he just told an entire newspaper audience about it — including how, three years ago, he tried killing himself.
“When I was perhaps 10 years old, my brother called me a faggot,” Isaac writes in an essay published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Neither of us was old enough to understand the concept of sexual orientation; he was merely teasing in the way older brothers do and using a word that had surely passed from the public sphere into his vocabulary via sheer osmosis. But now, “More than a decade has passed since my brother used that notorious homophobic slur. I am now 22, and, as it happens, I am gay.”
Isaac says that while he wasn’t bullied in high school, he did struggle with coming to terms with his sexuality. And it’s the recent string of LGBT youth killing themselves that made him decide to come out publicly.
That’s got to be quite a shock to his father Jonathan, whose paper “In Defense of Homophobia” included completely reasonable thinking like:
Homophobia is the moral judgement that homosexual behavior (most of the arguments in this essay refer specifically to male homosexual behavior) is wrong. Homophobia is not like ethnic, racial or religious prejudice, which deny the intrinsic moral rights and value of other people. Rather, it is a moral judgement upon acts engaged in by choice.
[...] What of those cursed with unnatural sexual desires? Must they forever suppress these desires? Yes, but this is hardly a unique fate. Almost everyone has desires which must be suppressed. Most men and women think adulterous thoughts fairly often, and find themselves attracted to members of the opposite sex to whom they are not married. Morality requires them to suppress these desires, and most do not commit adultery, though they feel lust in their hearts. Almost everyone, at one time or another, covets another’s property. They do not steal. Many people feel great anger or intense hatred at some time in their lives. They do not kill.
I am a homophobe, and proud.
(The essay was updated in 2003, after gay students on campus protested exclusion from blood drives: “In order to satisfy their demand for full acceptance by society, the homosexual movement demands to kill some transfusion recipients by infecting them with AIDS, or to kill patients who need transfusions by making it impossible for blood banks to collect blood.”)
Katz, you’ll recall, was part of Obama’s BP oil spill think tank — before being let go following the exposure of his homophobia. (For what it’s worth, Isaac says pulling him off the team was a “mistake,” homophobe or not.)
So what does young Isaac, a new University of Pennsylvania cum laude grad, think about daddy’s bigotry?
My father is a physics professor at Washington University. Years ago, he wrote an article on his personal website in which he justified homophobia as a “moral judgment” about a person’s actions. Even if one does not accept Judeo-Christian morality, he wrote, gays should be shunned because they are physically and morally responsible for the AIDS epidemic. Any person “cursed with unnatural sexual desires” should suppress those desires. Further, even if gays are thoroughly safe and monogamous, they are still morally culpable for the promiscuity that spread AIDS in the past, just as people who join the Ku Klux Klan without physically engaging in violence still share the responsibility for past Klan actions. Though one should “not engage in violence against homosexuals,” my father argued, one should ‘stay away from them.” The last line of the essay is as follows: “I am a homophobe, and proud.”
It is harder to stay away from homosexuals, I would imagine, when your son is one. When I told my dad I was gay, his immediate response was, “No, you’re not.” (My mom, by the way, was and is more supportive.) When my insistence finally overrode his denials, he echoed his online essay that I should deny who I am rather than to engage in an act so abhorrent as to love another man.
[...] I can’t change my dad’s thoughts about homosexuality overnight. Underlying his opinions and those of other homophobes is the belief that homosexuality is not ingrained within gay men and women, that someone attracted to people of the same sex should simply choose not to be a “practicing homosexual.” That this idea is absurd should be obvious to all straight people, unless they can identify a time in their lives when they chose to be straight and not gay, and would gladly become intimate with a same-sex partner if only they chose to.
Happy Coming Out Day!
NB: Professor Katz’s essay, once hosted on Washington University’s servers, is now offline.
“Homophobia is not like ethnic, racial or religious prejudice, which deny the intrinsic moral rights and value of other people. Rather, it is a moral judgement upon acts engaged in by choice.”
Exactaly, homphobia is a choice. Being Gay is not.
For a perfesser you shore are a dumb fuck……….
· Flag
My best wishes to Isaac Katz. So nice to see a gay person with guts for a change, instead of KAPOS like Anderson Cooper.
· Flag
Good for YOU! This young man sounds much more articulate and centered than I did at his age. I wish him well. I know he must love his dad, and so this must be hard. But, how courageous of him to take a public stand in opposition to his dad’s stupidity. YOU GO!
· Flag
“Homophobia is not like ethnic, racial or religious prejudice, which deny the intrinsic moral rights and value of other people.”
Why? Because gay people don’t have intrinsic moral rights or any human value?
“Rather, it is a moral judgement upon acts engaged in by choice.”
Oh, so it’s wrong to hate Jews generally, but perfectly fine to hate practicing Jews?
Sorry your dad’s such a dumbass, kiddo. Apparently it skips a generation.
· Flag
Isaac must have gotten his mother’s looks, and clearly her support has helped as he seems quite stable for having such a hateful father.
However, growing up with such a person can only make Isaac stronger and hopefully he has a great a productive life ahead.
· Flag
While it’s obviously a horrible thing for the child to have to suffer, I do find it interesting from a philosophical point of view that so many homophobic parents end up getting gay children. It’s almost as if it’s some kind of message to the parent.
· Flag
I always love “Plays well with others” comments. So true, homophobia is a choice. So is religion.
But it is very shallow and childish to say “and he’s ugly too.” Since when are looks the arbiter of anything to do with intelligence, one’s philosophy of life or any other pursuit requiring thought?
· Flag
We can’t choose the biological family we are born into. My dad was once on a local TV show proclaiming that all gays should be denied a security clearance. This was while I was working for a defense contractor and had such a clearance. I did not have the guts to stand up to him like you have done. My hope is your Dad will, in time, continue to love you as a son and come to accept that his opinion is wrong.
· Flag
So, I guess Bob Smith is right: Right wing, ultra-consertive politicians and pundits are the real cause of homosexuality. Phyllis Schlafley, Dick Cheney, Sally Kerns, Christine O’Donnell, Allen Keyes, Laura Ingraham, Barry Goldwater, Charles Socarides, and now Jonathan Katz. What do all these pundits/politicians/activists have in common? Not only are they severely right-wing, but they each have a child, sibling, grandchild, or close relative who is openly gay. Good job guys! Keep up the good work!
· Flag
@Jaroslaw: TYVM!
And to Issac: I am sure the vile comments your father spewed were eating away at you since he first uttered them. And your analogy of if we no more choose our sexuality than hetros do is something I one thousand percent co-sign. Far too often Gay offspring of those who spew their hatred upon us sit silent and never challange their parents vile rhetoric. To confront your fathers pathetic dogma in a public fourm took lots of courage……..
Mega kudos and admiration to you………….
· Flag
The essay IS on Wash U.’s server: http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/defense.html
Read the whole thing, if you can stomach it and see just what a sick fuck Katz is.
· Flag
Somebody at Pharyngula referenced Charles & Richard Socarides. I will never forget the This American Life episode that introduced me to Charles Socarides (co-founder of NARTH, etc)
http://www.thisamericanlife.or.....4/81-words
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Socarides
· Flag
This kid is so articulate. And the only real difference between his father, and most of the other 50% of the planet who hates us, is that this kid’d dad put his thoughts down in writing. Good for Issac for figuring out how to be himself in the environment he grew up in. Had to be tough. Child abuse always is.
· Flag
I know some of us consider this poetic justice that such a homophobe has a gay son.
IMO,hoping that rabid homophobes like this guy, Tom Emmer etc will have a gay son or daughter is assuming that once their child (or in some cases a sibling or other relative)comes out, they’ll change their views.
But we’ve seen enough cases of people like Alan Keyes and Newt Gringrich that still spew their venom against the LGBT community even knowing they have gay relatives.
Carl Paladino claims to have a gay nephew yet is not willing to back down from any of the homophobic statements he made.
And if you did a poll among the many homeless GLBT youth that are in our society, I’m willing to bet many of them came from religious, anti gay households.
Sad to say,for many of those on the religious right (and others)who view being gay as an abomination,sick etc,NOTHING will change their minds.
Their hatred and bigotry is strong than any love they will have for their own flesh and blood.
· Flag
Isaac Katz is a brave man.
I hope his father can change for the better and build a relationship with his son that they will be both happy with.
· Flag
“Further, even if gays are thoroughly safe and monogamous, they are still morally culpable for the promiscuity that spread AIDS in the past”
Really? This is a college physics professor, and that is the ability of his reasoning? In turn, he is saying that he shares the responsibility of the atomic bomb, and the lives taken with it reside on his shoulders as a Physicist. As an American he is responsible for the eradication of the American Indians, Slavery, injecting Guatemalans with syphilis, internment of Japanese Americans, harassment of the Jews, demonetization of Catholics, and all the other crimes that have been committed in our society. Does he accept culpability? If so, lets convict him and send him off to the death chamber.
· Flag
I had a (straight) friend who frequently expressed his admiration for attractive women, sometimes in rather “explicit” terms. He occasionally made negative comments about gays, and one day he said something to the effect that homosexuality was a choice. I asked him “Could you get it up for a man if you chose to?” That was the last time he said anything like that to me. I don’t know whether my question influenced his thinking or he just decided to avoid the topic after that.
· Flag
Anybody else notice that a lot of homophobes will try to claim it’s not “religious” bigotry, because it’s a “choice”?
Um, last I checked… religion was also a choice.
Hence, it follows that if they don’t want people having the “moral right” to harass them for their religious preferences, they should stop being a hypocrite about homosexuality, which is a lot harder to “choose” in comparison to religion.
Suffice it to say, I had no conscious say whatsoever in falling in love with another woman… one day we were extremely close friends, and the next, she came in to school crying about something, and my thoughts were “I would do anything to make her not hurt anymore”. Followed by the very sudden, terrifying realization that for the first time ever, I loved someone more than I loved myself; that I would give anything to make them happy and safe; that I would even take a bullet for them. And that this someone was another girl.
I didn’t “choose” to love her; it just happened, suddenly, and intensely, and irrevocably. I was in love, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do; the more I wanted not to feel that way, the more intense the feelings actually got – the fact that her home life meant she was in near-constant emotional pain didn’t help much, as it only made me want to hold her closer until it went away.
And I don’t give a damn that I was a teenager at the time; it wasn’t a simple crush, it wasn’t just infatuation. I know what I felt: I loved her, pure and simple. My heart simply wanted to belong to her, and her alone, and it wanted it badly enough that the brain and everything else got dragged along for the ride, helpless to change the course.
My experience with religion is considerably different.
I got to actively experiment with different religions and choose my own spiritual path; I alone took the spiritual experiences I had and decided to look at them the way I did, decided to consciously interpret them the way I did. It was a decision. A thoughtful, conscious, decision.
My religion was a choice.
Who I grow to love, is not, and has never been, a “choice”.
I have to wonder about these people who seem to think “religion” isn’t a choice, but love is. I suspect they haven’t actually experienced either one. If you’re only in your religion because that’s the way you were raised, you don’t have a “religion”, you have a set of traditions you CHOOSE to follow without bothering to question it.
And if you think love can always be “suppressed”, then you’ve yet to feel it with any real intensity.
· Flag
@JW: THANK YOU! I’ve been saying the same thing to Bigots since the late 70′s. If it’s OK to abuse Homosexuals because it’s a “Choice”, then abusing someone (setting aside Jewish folks) because of their (or their parents) choice of a religious “carrier” is just as Valid. Their replies tend to sound like a bass boat….but-but-but-but-but;>
· Flag
@Pat Duffy
I follow your argument but am confused as to why you set aside “jewish folks” !!!!!!
This especially perplexing cos jews invented homophobia which they passed onto christianity and islam. Consequently I have to ask how many gays have been tortured, mentally and physically, due to judaism, over the past 2 or 3 thousand years?
I don’t remember hearing, reading or seeing an apology for this crime, so why are you excluding jews?
So, explain please why you exclude jews from your list.
· Flag
Seriously, I think the only people who really believe sexuality is a matter of “choice” and that heterosexuality is the only right choice are bisexual people who haven’t come out to themselves yet. Because it’s really only bisexual people who may get to have any degree of “choice” in the matter anyway.
· Flag
yeah but if youre a straight person craving your neighbors wife, then according to you, you can still go home and have sex with their own wife! but gays cannot have sex with anyone? great for YOU. you are so dumb and i am so sad for your intelligent son. you should be ashamed and you will live with it for the rest of your ugly life.
· Flag
His cute.