On September 17, 1998, in response to a citizen report of an armed intruder “going crazy,” Harris County deputies rushed to 794 Normandy St., in Houston. When they arrived at the apartment of John Geddes Lawrence the door was unlocked, so the police entered the eighth-floor apartment and began to search for the gunman. The cops found no gunman, but the cops did find 55-year-old John Geddes Lawrence enthusiastically violating the Texas sodomy statutes with Tyron Garner, who was 24 years his junior.
The randy duo were taken from the apartment in their underwear. They spent 24 hours cooling off in jail. They were later fined $200 each plus an additional $141.25 in court costs. Mr. Lawrence’s prankish neighbor, Roger Nance, would spend 15 days in the slammer for filing a bogus crime report.
The Lamda Legal Defense Fund would later defend Lawrence and Garner before the Supreme Court. What bugged these gay lawyers the most was the fact that twenty-six years before, in 1972, when Texas revised its penal code, heterosexual sodomy and bestiality were dropped as criminal offenses in Texas. Only homosexual anal intercourse remained in the statute. If the cops had stumbled upon John Lawrence stark naked between satin sheets doing the Big Nasty with a Rottweiler, all they could have done was suggest that he choose a sex partner of his own species. It seemed wrong to the Lamda lawyers that Lawrence and Garner were being penalized just because they wanted to play Rump Ranger with each other.
At that moment nine states had sodomy laws that prohibited consensual sodomy for everyone: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia. Another four states, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri, had statutes that forbade oral and anal sex between persons of the same sex. None of these laws were regularly enforced. Lawrence and Garner had pleaded no contest at their trial, which left the door open for an appeal of their conviction. After losing a subsequent appeal in a Texas court, the matter was appealed again and finally came for consideration before the United States Supreme Court, where it was officially dubbed Lawrence and Garner vs. Texas.
The Lawrence Decision
Based on early arguments on behalf of Lawrence and Garner, it appeared that the court would take the socially least disruptive path and decide the case on the basis of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection before the law. It was anticipated that the court would simply say that Texas law could not punish homosexuals who performed sex acts that were not violations of the law when performed by heterosexuals. That’s all the court needed to do. No precedents would have been set; no established law would have been overturned. Such a simple decision would have sidestepped the deeper question of the constitutional status of homosexual rights. Nonetheless, the very fact that the Supreme Court was even considering such a case only seventeen years after it had dismissed as “facetious” the very idea that a constitutional right to privacy extended to private homosexual sex acts lent an air of tension to the courtroom, which was packed with the elite corps of Washington’s gay and lesbian lawyers, who had filled all the seats reserved for the Supreme Court bar by 6:30 A.M. for the 11 o’clock arguments.
When the arguments began it was clear that the two advocates were a mismatch. The advocate for Lawrence and Garner was Paul M. Smith, a former Supreme Court law clerk whose assured presentation was the result of years of experience. Mr. Smith, an openly gay lawyer, had been before the court in eight previous cases. He was unperturbed even while sparring with Antonin Scalia. By contrast, Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., the district attorney from Harris County, was in this arena for the first time. He seemed surprised by questions that he should have anticipated. He seemed not to comprehend the repeated offers of help extended to him by Justice Scalia. During his oration the frustrated justices finally resorted to sparring with one another while ignoring Mr. Rosenthal. All of the justices queried Mr. Smith, but 23 of the 35 questions asked of him came from Justice Scalia. Eight of the justices appeared content to let the colloquies between Mr. Smith and Justice Scalia showcase the issues.
Justice Scalia was clearly unimpressed by Mr. Smith’s arguments. Mr. Smith argued that a homosexual’s right to indulge in homosexual acts privately might be rooted in a cantankerous libertarian spirit of personal privacy dating back to the nation’s beginnings. He remained silent about the fact that America has always maintained anti-sodomy statutes. Mr. Smith drew attention to the repeal of anti-sodomy statutes in three-fourths of the states as evidence of an emerging social consensus on sodomy; he argued that such statutes were “not consistent with our basic American values,” to which Justice Scalia responded: “Well, it depends on what you mean by basic American values. Suppose that all the states had laws against flagpole sitting at one time,” and subsequently repealed them. “Does that make flagpole sitting a fundamental right?”
In the aggregate, the arguments were far from exhaustive. Mr. Smith completed his argument in a mere thirty minutes. All arguments began and ended on March 26, 2003. Ninety days later, on June 26th, the nine justices made public their decision and opinions. The courtroom was packed with people habituated to the most far-flung sexual appetites; their mood was wavering between expectation and apprehension. Then Justice Kennedy began to speak. The gay and lesbian lawyers were the first to show signs of relief. By the time Kennedy began expounding about the dignity and respect that homosexuals deserve, some of the sexual inverts in the audience were weeping with joy.
The breadth of the majority decision was startling. The justices, all of them near 70 years of age, had become engrossed in the nature of human sexuality. They also revealed an unanticipated attentiveness to changing legal fashions beyond America’s borders and a concern that the United States was not keeping pace with these new European trends. Justice Kennedy cited a 1981 gay rights opinion by the European Court of Human Rights which was the first citation of any decision by that court in a Supreme Court majority decision. Justice Scalia criticized this novel invocation as evidence of some sort of Western consensus on sexual privacy; he cautioned that the Supreme Court should not infuse foreign sensibilities into American constitutional law.
Only seventeen years ago, in 1986, the Supreme Court had held that Georgia’s sodomy law, which applied equally to heterosexuals and homosexuals, did not violate any constitutionally protected right to privacy. In that majority opinion Justice Byron White opined that “to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious.” This 1986 ruling is known as Bowers vs. Hardwick, and the majority decision held that the Constitution does not implicitly protect a right to engage in unrestricted private consensual sexual hijinx. The court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas overturned Bowers vs. Texas and with it every other anti-sodomy statute in America.
Based on little more than personal sentiment, six of the Supreme Court justices laid the cornerstone of an American gay utopia. Liberal columnist E.J. Dionne called Justice Kennedy’s opinion “a Magna Carta of gay rights.” The justices’ eloquent and effusive embrace of people with splinter-group sexual proclivities was better suited to a legislature than a courtroom, but Kennedy is not a legislator, he is a judge, and a judge is supposed to point to some justification in the Constitution for his decisions. Instead, Kennedy propped up his decision with a rubber crutch he called “substantive due process,” which was no more than a deliberate contortion of constitutional verbiage about “due process” in an effort to fabricate new rights out of thin air. By using non-legal values to decide this case, Justice Kennedy undermined the constitutional order that undergirds our republic. Kennedy spent a disproportionate amount of time fretting about the “demeaning” aspect of the Texas law, which is really none of the court’s proper concern. The issues before the court were whether the Texas law violated the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Constitution.
Sandra Day O’Connor observed that Texas treats the same conduct differently based solely on whether the participants are gay or straight. O’Connor agreed that the Texas law should be voided based on the Equal Protection Clause, but she stated her belief that the Georgia law (Bowers) should not have been overruled. This was sensible. But the majority opinion relied on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which reads: “No state shall. . .deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Texas penal code does impose constraints on liberty, but so do laws against prostitution, heroin distribution, or working more than sixty hours a week in a bakery. As Justice Scalia observed, “there is no right to ‘liberty’ under the Due Process Clause, though today’s opinion repeatedly makes that claim. The Fourteenth Amendment expressly allows states to deprive their citizens of ‘liberty’, so long as ‘due process of law’ is provided.”
The doctrine known as “substantive due process” holds that the Due Process Clause forbids states from infringing fundamental liberties, unless that infringement is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that only fundamental rights qualify for “heightened scrutiny” protection. To qualify as a fundamental right it must be “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.” And, as Justice Scalia observed, “All other liberty interests may be abridged or abrogated pursuant to a validly enacted state law if that law is rationally related to a legitimate state interest.”
The Bowers decision held that laws against homosexual sodomy do not warrant heightened scrutiny because such laws do not involve any fundamental right under the Due Process Clause. Indeed, the Bowers decision noted that the proscription against homosexual sodomy had ancient roots and that sodomy was a criminal offense at common law and was forbidden by the laws of all the original thirteen states when they ratified the Bill of Rights. In deciding the Bowers case the Supreme Court rightly concluded that a right to indulge in anal intercourse was not “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.” The Lawrence decision did not overrule this position. Nowhere in the Lawrence decision do the justices describe homosexual sodomy as a “fundamental right” or a “fundamental liberty interest” that might subject the Texas law to heightened scrutiny. Instead, the court contended that the Texas law failed a “rational-basis” test.
The court made the claim, unsupported by any citations, that anti-sodomy laws do not seem to have been enforced against adults acting in private, to which Justice Scalia responded with the observation that sodomy is rarely performed on stage. “If all the Court means by ‘acting in private’ is ‘on private premises, with the doors closed and the windows covered’, it is entirely unsurprising that evidence of enforcement would be hard to come by. . .Surely, that lack of evidence would not sustain the proposition that consensual sodomy on private premises with the doors closed and windows covered was regarded as a ‘fundamental right’, even though all other consensual sodomy was criminalized.” He went on to cite the hundreds of prosecutions for sodomy from 1880 to 1995, as well as 20 prosecutions and four executions during the colonial period. “Bowers’ conclusion that homosexual sodomy is not a fundamental right ‘deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition’ is utterly unassailable,” said Scalia.
Finally, Justice Scalia turned to the shallow contention that there is no rational basis for a law prohibiting homosexual sodomy. Said the justice, “This proposition is so out of accord with our jurisprudence – indeed, with the jurisprudence of any society we know – that it requires little discussion.”
The following are quotations from Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion:
The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are “immoral and unacceptable,” – the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity. Bowers held that this was a legitimate state interest. The Court today reaches the opposite conclusion. The Texas statute, it says “furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.” The Court embraces instead Justice Stevens’ declaration in his Bowers dissent, that “the fact that the governing majority is a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislations. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.
Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct……
One of the most revealing statements in today’s opinion is the Court’s grim warning that the criminalization of homosexual conduct is “an invitation to subject homosexual persons to discrimination both in the public and in the private spheres.” It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring , as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed. Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as “discrimination” which it is a function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession’s anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously “mainstream”; that in most states what the Court calls “discrimination” against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal; that proposals to ban such “discrimination” under Title VII have repeatedly been rejected by Congress; that in some cases such “discrimination” is a constitutional right….
What Texas has chosen to do is well within the range of traditional democratic action, and its hand should not be stayed through the invention of a brand-new “constitutional right” by a Court that is impatient of democratic change. It is indeed true that “later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress” and when that happens, later generations can repeal those laws. But it is the premise of our system that those judgments are to be made by the people, and not imposed by a governing caste that knows best…”
In short, a rogue court, functioning as a band of philosopher kings, had planted its boot heel squarely in the face of America’s people and the people’s elected representatives. Not content to simply even things up with a simple Equal Protection argument, the architects of the majority decision chose to strike a pose as judicial activists, as forward thinkers, as avatars of avant-garde judicial fashion. They wanted to be modern jurists or, better yet, post-modern jurists. They wanted backward America to catch up to fashionable Europe. Within minutes of the court’s 6-to-3 decision, homosexuals were dancing on the courthouse steps and planning celebrations in forty cities. The Lamda Defense Fund called it “the most significant ruling ever for gay rights.” The ruling struck down anti-sodomy laws in 13 southern and western states.
From all the hyperbole that floated around this case you might imagine that the Texas law had wrought a reign of terror on the queer folk. Justice Anthony Kennedy had intoned: “liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places.” Why he said this is anyone’s guess. The police had probable cause to enter John Lawrence’s unlocked apartment; they had received an eyewitness report of a gunman “going crazy.” Under these circumstances the cops didn’t need a warrant to enter the apartment. In their search the police stumbled upon two nominally adult males who were violating a statute. It was an awkward moment for everyone; the cops felt compelled to do their duty.
The arrest of Lawrence and Garner was the result of an extremely rare happenstance. They were the only two homosexuals ever to be convicted under the Texas sodomy statute in Harris County. In Texas, homosexual conduct was a mere class C misdemeanor, which is the lowest ranking prohibition that Texas has. The authorities in other states said that the Lawrence ruling would have little impact on day-to-day law enforcement because the anti-sodomy statutes were so seldom used. Virtually all arrests of homosexuals, as homosexuals, are for public lewdness and performing sex acts in public. The lewdness statutes, which apply equally to both homosexuals and heterosexuals, were not affected by the Lawrence ruling.
So why the celebration by homosexuals over the disappearance of a few laws that were rarely enforced? The answer lies in the tone and texture of the court’s majority opinion. According to the New York Times (6/27/03) “Gay activists…called the ruling the most significant legal victory in the gay rights movement, likening the decision to the seminal civil rights case, Brown v. Board of Education. They predicted it would embolden the movement…” The Times went on: “Activists and scholars said that by essentially acknowledging gay relationships as legitimate, the Supreme Court justices gave the gay rights movement new credibility in debates about marriage, partner benefits, adoption and parental rights.” Said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission: “The court has put gay people in the mainstream of society for the first time.”
Clearly, what the court had done was to take the so-called right to privacy, a right which is nowhere explicit in the Constitution and was “discovered” by the court itself, and place it above the long established standards of community morality, human customs and religious laws that encode thousands of years of human experience. Ecstatic homosexuals were now raving over a court decision that legalized their anal-erotic compulsions. Alan Van Capelle, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, compared the impact of the court decision to New York City’s Stonewall riot “that launched the gay rights movement 34 years ago today.” “This is so big,” said Van Capelle, “For my generation, we’ll be talking about where we were when the Lawrence decision came down.”
Only days after the court decision came the kick off of the 34th annual Gay Pride Parade. A jubilant crowd had celebrated the night before in Sheridan Square near the Stonewall bar. According to Eric Tucker, a writer for the Associated Press, “The parade commemorates the Stonewall riots of 1969, when patrons of a gay bar in Greenwich Village fought back against a police raid.” Mr. Tucker’s reportage is a prime example of the sort of cozy faux history that undergirds contemporary gay mythology. The truth is, there never was a police raid on the Stonewall bar and there never were any heroic bar patrons who resisted anti-gay police oppression. Not a single one. What really happened was this: Early one morning, before the Stonewall was open for business, a building inspector arrived at the Stonewall to make a routine code-violation inspection. The lone inspector was accompanied by a policeman. During the inspection, someone in the bar exchanged words with the policeman and their altercation spilled out into the early morning sunlight where several unemployed transvestites were lounging about. Like chimps in a Jane Goodall documentary, the males in feminine attire began defending one of their own by pelting the policeman with rocks and trash. The policeman radioed for assistance. His reinforcement arrived. Matters worsened as both sides committed more troops to the fray. From beginning to end the so-called “Stonewall uprising” was a minor, squalid altercation, one of countless demimonde disturbances in the Big City.
What made Stonewall “different” was the zeitgeist. The notion of “gay rights” had been floating in the air for some time and the Stonewall brawl presented an opportunity to focus public attention on the aspirations of homosexuals and others with unconventional sexual proclivities. New York City’s ultra-Left-all-the-time radio station, WBAI, played up the seedy Stonewall disturbance as though it were the storming of the Bastille. Gay activists west of the Hudson River say it was another five years before they first heard of Stonewall. Nonetheless, current gay mythology holds that the modern gay movement sprang from Stonewall. It’s not true, but that’s what every media hack is constrained by political correctness to tell you. (For the full details of Stonewall, see Homophobia, in this series.)
The rock and bottle throwers of 1969 now call themselves the Stonewall Veterans Association and they carried a banner in the Gay Pride Parade. On the streets of New York, Mayor Bloomberg pandered to the gay vote. He smiled; he waved the rainbow flag; he posed for photographs with a middle-aged transvestite in a white wig, stars-and-stripes dress with plunging neckline, red fishnet stockings and faux-diamond encrusted sunglasses. Said the gay man to the mayor: “He’s not bad at all with drag queens.”
After three decades, the New York gay parade and its clones in Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Minneapolis and San Francisco have become a predictable river of feather boas, rainbow wigs, rhinestone tiaras, leather, pink spandex, stiletto heels, thongs, rubber fetish wear, and in-your-face nudity. It’s the way gay Americans choose to present themselves to the rest of America. Observed Maria-Elena Grant of the Lavender Light Gospel Choir, “In a sense it’s more important than ever to say that we’re here and we’re queer.” In San Francisco, the ever popular lesbian exhibitionists known as Dykes on Bikes rumbled along on their motorcycles, their bare breasts bobbing in the breeze. They were followed by some quieter gay guys pedaling bicycles who billed themselves as Mikes on Bikes.
Known officially as New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride March, the parade lasted five hours and flowed from Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street down to the West Village where it ended at Greenwich and Christopher Streets. Shouting through a megaphone, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) bellowed “Let’s even hear it for the Supreme Court – who ever thought we’d say that?”
Marty Downs, a community organizer with the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, said, “There’s such a response, such a sense of movement. This year, it feels really political.” Tom Ammiano, who is one of two candidates campaigning to become the first gay mayor of San Francisco, remarked, “We got a couple of breaks in the last few weeks, with Canada legalizing gay marriage and now the Supreme Court. It looks like Sandra Day O’Connor watching “Will & Grace” really paid off.” Homosexual activists predicted that the Lawrence decision would pave the way toward same-sex marriage. Said lesbian Lisa Sbrana, “It gives us legitimacy for marriages and adoption.”
Just prior to the Gay Pride Parade, sixty same-sex couples participated in the third annual symbolic commitment ceremony called The Wedding Party. Amy Nisbet, 4, threw confetti in the air as her mom exchanged vows with another woman. Maurice Santiago tugged nervously at his long white gown as his partner Carlos opened a small velvet jewel box that held two gold wedding rings. A spokeswoman for The Wedding Party declared that these folks deserve all 1,049 federal benefits granted to married people.
The ceremonies, which were presided over by sympathetic clergy, served as a rallying point for activists promoting the mainstreaming of homosexual behavior and homosexual marriage in particular. It was probably no coincidence that the Lawrence decision came only three days before the annual gay festivities: the liberals on the Supreme Court were intent on changing the fabric of American society.
The Gay Agenda
After a Supreme Court majority decided the case of Lawrence V. Texas, an irate reader sent a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. In his letter, an incensed Robert Orban fumed, “As for Justice Scalia, his worrisome use of the religious-right code phrase ‘the homosexual agenda’ should concern anyone who cares about impartiality.” Apparently Mr. Orban believes, or would have us believe, that there is no “homosexual agenda,” that the queer folk are just so many disorganized, politically unsophisticated innocents whose intentions are sweet and pure and no threat whatsoever to the defining norms of American society. Is this true? Is there, or isn’t there, a homosexual agenda?
In 1987 two homosexual visionaries, Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill, laid the groundwork for the normalization of kinky sex in their seminal essay The Overhauling of Straight America, which was published in The Guide, a magazine devoted to gay behaviors, gay sex and politics. In this essay the authors explained to their gay compatriots how to desensitize the public to the point that Americans would “view homosexuality with indifference instead of keen emotion.” If this could be accomplished, the authors assured the gay community, their battle to mainstream gay behavior was “virtually won.” The authors called for a “large-scale media campaign” to “change the image of gays in America.” They proposed a six-point agenda.
First of all, they admonished their fellow travelers to “Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible.” Their theory was that relentless chatter about this sexually deviant 2% of the population would make homosexual behavior seem commonplace, even normal. They instructed gays to “use talk to muddy the moral waters” when people with religious convictions had moral objections. They encouraged homosexuals to curry favor with liberal churches and then use this support to undermine the moral authority of traditional churches. They urged gays to spin-doctor biblical teachings and portray traditionalists as backwoods hicks who are hopelessly out of touch with the latest moral fashions.
Point two of their explicit agenda was to “Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers.” These clever propagandists noted that “In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be included by reflex to assume the role of protector.” In the seventeen years since this essay was written this gay-agenda goal has found expression in countless public school “safe zones,” classrooms where students who have questions about their sexuality can go to talk to teachers who may then refer them to gay activist groups for counseling without parental notification or consent. The acceptance of this propagandistic news slant also explains why the slaying of gay Matthew Shepherd held the attention of newspapers for months, while the brutal kidnapping, gang rape and murder of Jesse Dirkhising by homosexuals was deemed simply not newsworthy. (see Homophobia, in this series)
Kirk and Pill acknowledged that homosexuals were not likely to make much social headway by seeking direct support for homosexual practices. Instead they suggested that gays play up the antidiscrimination angle, which would work well with the “gays as victims” theme set forth above. They instructed gays to “give protectors just cause” and to portray all those who opposed them as brainless bigots. This was point three of their agenda.
Point four was to “Make gays look good.” Gays should be portrayed as solid citizens; the less said about flaming drag queens and fisting orgies in leather bars, the better. Making gays look good has been a preoccupation at the New York Times since the Lawrence decision. Glowing profiles of gay lovers and gay parents are now a staple at the Times.
The fifth objective of this gay manifesto is to “Make the victimizers look bad.” By “victimizer” they mean anyone who would dream of objecting to their unraveling of the nation’s moral fabric. Here the two visionaries become more strident: “At a later stage of the media campaign for gay rights – long after other gay ads have become commonplace – it will be time to get tough with remaining opponents. To be blunt, they must be vilified…Our goal here is twofold. First, we seek to replace the mainstream’s self-righteous pride about its homophobia with shame and guilt. Second, we intend to make the anti-gays look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.”
They go on to detail the sorts of imagery that might be used to best effect in their late-stage propaganda campaign. The opposition to the gay social agenda, they suggest, should be depicted as Ku Klux Klansmen, “drooling” southern ministers, punks, thugs and convicts. They suggest a follow-up tour of Nazi concentration camps. Anyone who gets in their way will be demeaned as comical or deranged or a menace.
The final objective of Kirk-and-Pill’s agenda is fund raising: “Solicit Funds.” Propaganda machines run on money, so they offer fund raising suggestions. Thousands of organizations, websites and school programs now promote this six-point program, sometimes openly but often in disguised forms.
So, we need wonder no longer: there is a gay social agenda, an explicit plan to mainstream the homosexual subculture and the behavioral norms that are peculiar to it.
The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Network has a working budget of 3.5 million dollars. Its purpose is to shape the moral values of American school children. It has become a powerful force in American schools and it too has a written agenda; it’s titled Institutionalized Heterosexism in Our Schools: A Guide to Understanding and Undoing It. The Network defines heterosexism as “the belief that heterosexuality is ‘normal’.” In other words, even though ninety-eight percent of the world’s population is inclined toward heterosexuality, you are a pig-headed heterosexist bigot if you believe that heterosexuality is normal. This is what passes for rationality in the gay community.
At their 1999 GLSEN convention in Atlanta, speakers outlined their battle plan. GLSEN’s communications director, James Anderson, announced: “We’re going to raise a generation of kids who don’t believe the religious right.” In case anyone missed the point, Deanna Duby of the National Education Association hit the nail on the head when she affirmed that “the schools of today are the governments of tomorrow.” So the NEA is in bed with the gay activists.
In 2000 the same Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, together with the Massachusetts Education Department, sponsored a TeachOUT at Tufts University in Boston. Their purpose was to teach public school teachers how to weave lots of positive messages about homosexuality into their classroom instruction. The instruction included how to enlighten your kids about homosexual behaviors, including the ever-popular “fisting”: stuffing one’s fist into another person’s rectum.
Not to be outdone, a Newton South High School teacher, in Newton, Massachusetts, described to the Boston Globe how he worked “bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgendered” material into his classroom instruction. He handed out copies of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and insisted that his students write essays about it. This novel showcases such frolicsome fun as boy-dog anal intercourse, hot pumpin’ man-boy sex, anal intercourse between boys, male masturbation and throbbing female masturbation with a hot dog. A parent who took exception to all this was dismissed as a moralizing heterosexist. Every public school in America is now a target of opportunity for infiltration by agents committed to the gay agenda.
Speech codes and “anti-harassment” policies now effectively suppress even mild expressions of doubt by students about the moral stature of homosexual behavior. In the name of “anti-discrimination” doubters are told to keep their mouths shut, or are ridiculed by teachers as fools. For a more expansive exploration of this in-school indoctrination read Persecution by David Limbaugh (Regnery Publishing).
So, the gay social agenda exists, it is explicit, it has written manifestos, it is in full swing, it is well funded, and it has the support of influential organizations, including a large and dedicated following among America’s public school teachers. We can see clearly now that all of those snide portrayals of Justice Scalia as some sort of right-wing rustic for merely referring to the “so-called gay rights agenda” were just a smokescreen to mask the fact that there is a big fat aggressive and invasive gay social agenda.
Strange Biology
Much of what aspires to be a debate over the issue of homosexual wedlock appears to be little more than an exchange of brickbats. The gay lobby calls its opponents “backward” and the traditionalists call the homosexuals “sinful”. Much of this exchange takes place in letter to editors and emotional ventilations on talk radio. A closer consideration of these exchanges reveals the presence of primitive proto-arguments.
By calling the traditionalists backward, the gay lobby means to convey their reading of history; they see society as gradually progressing from treating homosexuals as criminals, to treating them as medical patients, to treating them as merely queer, as odd but unthreatening fellow humans. The next logical step in this progression, as they see it, is full acceptance and full integration into society’s institutions, including matrimony. People who don’t share this vision of progressive social evolution are imagined to be blind, uneducated and standing in the way of History.
When traditionalists call homosexuals sinful they are trying to convey one of several things, depending upon which tradition they are defending. The biblical traditionalists see themselves, and people like themselves, as the bedrock of a well-ordered society; they look to Leviticus as a reminder of what they are not. They are definitely not “sodomites,” and this shared vision of themselves gives society a solid center. Living consistently in adherence to tradition is understood to be a force for social cohesion which serves to preserve civilization. Any behaviors that threaten this social cohesion meet the traditionalist’s definition of sinful.
The word sin was originally an ancient Aramaic archery term; it meant, literally, to miss the mark. Many traditionalists use the word sinful in this sense to convey their perception that homosexuals have wandered off the well-worn path of sensible, or even sane, conduct. Why would they see homosexuals this way? The most obvious reason is the queerness of homosexual behavior. The internal emotional compass that guides homosexuals points away from the emotional magnetic north that orients ninety-eight percent of humanity.
Homosexuals insist that they “were born this way,” that their homosexuality is inborn and therefore “natural.” We are left to infer that because their homosexuality is so “natural” that it must also be “good,” a purposeful part of Mother Nature’s rainbow coalition. It’s a weak argument. Nature is replete with oddities, each in its own niche, which is not bad, but not “good” either; they are just odd.
Scientific evidence supports the testimony of gays that their gayness emerges from a constellation of proclivities that have their origins in the fine-grained neurologies and chemistries that are peculiar to homosexual humans. There is no standard homosexual. Homosexuality may result from a genetic mutation or from exposure to the wrong hormone during fetal development. Cultural influences, personal experiences and organic defects, such as an inability to produce or respond to one’s own hormones, will also shape the final expression of sexuality. There is, in short, a variety of homosexualities, all of which are the result of abnormal development. Sometimes things go haywire. Take, for example, lesbians.
Where Do Lesbians Come From?
Both sexes are genetically coded to become either males or females. During the development of a normal male human, the little fellow’s genetic code triggers the development of testes, which soon begin secreting the powerful and formative hormone testosterone. This hormone shapes the neurological architecture of the developing male so that at birth his body (morphology) and his natural proclivities (neurology) complement one another. It is this complementary relation between body and psyche that makes him a normal male.
Normal female humans follow a similar path, with the exception that their genetic codes dictate the development of female organs and the secretion of female hormones. The normal female has a neurology (psyche) that complements her morphology.
The key to unlocking the mystery of lesbian creation is this one simple fact: the bodies of both sexes produce both estrogen and testosterone, though in very different proportions. Also: both sexes begin life in the womb as morphological females. If the body of a woman were to secrete an excessive amount of testosterone while she was pregnant with a daughter, then the mother’s testosterone would have the same effect on her developing daughter’s developing neurology that a male fetus’ testosterone has on his own developing neurology. The daughter would be born a morphological female, but with a quasi-male neurology. Scholarly papers coyly referred to such offspring as “tomboys” as long ago as the 1960s.
The mismatched conjoining of female morphology and quasi-male neurology raises a provocative question: are lesbians women? They are convincingly female in appearance, but are they women? The words “female” and “human” are biological categories, but the word “woman” designates a cultural category. Within any culture, what makes a female a woman is her embrace of certain culturally defined feminine virtues. Without this core of feminine virtues a female does not achieve womanhood. She may lack beauty, or brilliance, or fertility and still be a vessel of feminine virtue and therefore a woman. Conversely, a female may be beautiful, brilliant and fertile and still be so queer in her appetites and inclinations as to have stumbled beyond the borders of her culture’s definition of what a woman truly is. This is one reason why lesbian marriage feels so alien; not only is there no man in the union, there are no women in it either. Every gay marriage would be a caricature of traditional marriage, an institutional gargoyle emerging from a corrupted biology.
Advertisements for an Alien Culture
Now that Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill have specifically enumerated the battle plan of homosexual activism we can more clearly identify the motivations of writers in the popular press. The New York Times has been preeminent in its promotion of the gay agenda; the Times has followed the Kirk/Pill strategy to the letter. Since the Lawrence decision the New York Times has been unswerving in its vigorous promotion of homosexual marriage. Not a week passes without some charming profile of some flawlessly endearing gay person or gay couple. Sometimes three such articles appear in a single issue of the Times. It’s really sort of creepy. Meet the Stepford Gays:
On January 12, 2004 the New York Times put an article titled Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home on its front page. It was a mash note to homosexual fatherhood. We are told that “The obstacles to finding surrogate mothers and of discriminatory adoption laws that favor heterosexual couples have led some gay men to pursue parenthood with fervor.” The article avoids nettlesome questions about why surrogate moms and adoption experts might “discriminate” against homosexual couples. The Times writer evinces not a bit of curiosity about these things. The article is about how superior gay stay-at-home males are when compared with mere mothers: “Of the 9,328 same-sex couples with children whose census returns were randomly selected for analysis by the Census Bureau, 26 percent of the male couples included a stay-at-home parent…That figure is one percent more than for married couples with children.”
According to the 2000 census, only 20 percent of male couples and a third of female couples live in a households with children. The total of all such households does not exceed 156,000, which is microscopic when compared to the vast heterosexual majority. Remember, gays are only 2% of the population to begin with. The true purpose of this article was to highlight points one and four of the Kirk/Pill gay agenda: “Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible” and “Make gays look good.”
On Tuesday, December 16, 2003 the Times devoted 42 column inches to telling the heart-warming story of Elmer Lokkins, 84, and Gustavo Archilla, 88, “who hid their sexual orientation for 58 years.” The article is titled “They Held Out for Marriage” and subtitled “After 6 Decades of Decorum in Public, Gus and Elmer Eloped.” Yup! They “crossed the Canadian border near Niagra Falls and were married.” The Times got right to the point: “The couple capture what some in the gay rights movement say is an essential but unappreciated point in the argument for same-sex marriage: it offers something more basic and profound than survivor rights and shared health care. For gays and lesbians, the power of marriage lies in the sanctity of its tradition, its social legitimacy…” In no sense was this newspaper article news. It was a mood piece intended to talk about gayness, to make gayness seem normal, to “make gays look good.”
The first page of the Times Metro Section (12/20/03) showcased a glowing profile of a lesbian couple titled “More Than Mere Partners” and subtitled “By Example, Lesbian Couple Try to State Case for Marriage.” Actually, it’s the New York Times that is trying to state the case. The writer, Andrew Jacobs, goes through comical contortions to make two sexual inverts non-threatening. In the very first paragraph we are told that “there is nothing flamboyant about the Kilian-Meneghin household” and that there are “Norman Rockwell figurines in the beige-on-brown living room.” We are assured that one of the lesbians is “soft-spoken” and the other one is “nerdy.” We are soothed by the knowledge that they “have a pair of exceedingly polite children” and “an elderly cat named Spot.” In case we missed his point, Mr. Jacobs drives it home by telling us that “By most standards, the family is as all-American and unremarkable as they come.” That’s just the first paragraph.
Eventually the writer gets around to telling us that these two females are plaintiffs in a lawsuit “that has turned New Jersey into the next battleground in the war over same-sex marriage.” Guess which side the Times is on? We are told that “more than anything” they want to avoid “an onerous payout to the Internal Revenue Service” should either of them die. We hear from Ms. Kilian’s boss who says of the lesbians, “They’re worse than Ozzie and Harriet…They’re the most boring people I’ve ever met.” Translation: these gays are non-threatening. They drag their kids to news conferences and photo ops where son Joshua obligingly chirps “Everyone knows we’re a fun family!” Both lesbians became pregnant with the assistance of sperm banks, one of the techniques known in lesbian street parlance as “sperm trapping.”
Once again, an article with little news value is used to “talk about gays and gayness” and “muddy the moral waters” and “portray gays as victims” and “make gays look good.” The Times was following the gay agenda to the letter. Surely anyone who would stand in the way of these two Ozzie-and Harriet, soft-spoken and nerdy, “all-American and unremarkable” collectors of Norman Rockwell figurines, must be a heartless victimizer.
That’s the real message; you are a monster if you are against same-sex marriage. And yet, there lingers that nagging phrase from the first paragraph: “By most standards the family is all-American and unremarkable.” Small flaws can produce dire consequences. It’s the profoundly non-standard dimensions of gay relationships and behaviors that should hold our attention. Articles such as these are designed to distract our attention from the very things to which it should be riveted. These are not news articles, they are crypto-advertisements for an alien culture.
Most Americans have never read the New York Times, have never even held an issue in their hands. So why should you care what they publish? Here’s the reason: the publishers of newspapers across America have the Times delivered to their desks every morning. The Times sets the standard for most of the print and electronic media. Most of the media share the cultural biases of the Times editorial staff. The sensibility of the Times feels comfortable to the scribblers and the talking haircuts who mold public opinion in countless media markets across America. They use the Times as a blueprint for how they should present issues to you. So even if you have never seen a copy of the New York Times you do, in fact, read a version of it every day.
The propaganda campaign in support of homosexual wedlock is distinguished by the near absence of intellectual rigor. The New York Times and its sing-along satellite imitators persist in repeating the same tiresome formula: they offer carefully sanitized portraits of “safe” homosexuals and then ask the rhetorical question, “What possible harm would result if Bert and Ernie were able to enter into a socially sanctioned marriage?” This presentation places the burden of the argument on society; society is expected to justify its refusal to approve of homosexual wedlock.
The gay propagandists have it backwards. The burden of the argument is on their shoulders. Like bioengineers introducing some new genetically altered “Frankenfood” into the biosphere, the burden of proof is on the homosexual lobby to demonstrate to society that homosexual wedlock will not alter the existing sociosphere in ways that society will find discomfiting. As Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out, neither the arguments that preceded the Lawrence decision nor the Lawrence decision itself established an absolute right to privacy for homosexual behavior. Homosexuality has always been morally suspect in the opinion of Christian societies; it has no history of acceptance in Christian culture. Around 550 BC, when the Greeks were cranking out homoerotic poetry, the Jews were writing the book of Leviticus which mandated the death penalty for homosexual acts. Leviticus was the law. It served to order Jewish society and to differentiate Judaism from Mediterranean cults in which transvestite priests, eunuchs and sex acts were central to cult rituals. The things people do not do can be an important defining dimension of who they are as a people. A shared social vision of themselves as a people who do not indulge in certain behaviors is an important force for social cohesion in many societies.
For Christian people, the homosexuality of ancient Greece was always tainted by its close association with pederasty and Roman homoerotism was tainted by its association with slavery. Though the gay community imagines the ancient world to be a golden age of homoerotism, both Greek and Roman homosexuality are tainted by the element of coercion, which Christian culture finds repugnant.
A 13th century French law demanded that “Whoever is proved to be a sodomite shall lose his testicles. And if he does it a second time, he shall lose his member. And if he does it a third time, he shall be burned.” This attitude toward sexual inverts remained a constant for centuries. As late as the 19th century, between 1806 and 1835, sixty homosexuals were hanged in England. As that century progressed, enlightened society came to think of homosexuality as a medical condition.
Still Crazy After All These Years
Homosexuals are quick to remind everyone that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its encyclopedia of mental disorders two decades ago, in 1973. We are supposed to infer from this historical footnote that homosexuality is just one more harmless human sexual response, that psychiatry has embraced an emerging enlightenment about the gay psyche, that progressive psychiatric professionals had, at last, cast off a suffocating prejudice. In truth, the removal of homosexuality from the list of mental disorders was the result of an odd and unethical collusion between a select group of APA committee members and radical gay activists. The change was purely political.
From the first days of gay activism the promoters of the gay agenda understood that the public’s perception of homosexuals as mentally disordered was an impediment to their lobbying efforts. In 1968, representatives of gay organizations began a political campaign to persuade renowned psychiatrists and the officers of mental health organizations to reclassify the entire spectrum of homosexual behaviors and urges as healthful manifestations of human sexuality. For three years the APA’s small Homosexuality Task Force collaborated closely with the Gay Activist’s Alliance, the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, among others. Organizations with contrasting perspectives were excluded from the deliberations; persons holding contrary opinions were excluded from membership in the APA Task Force and denied even the opportunity to present contradictory evidence to the Task Force. In short, the Homosexuality Task Force was a star-chamber proceeding, a kangaroo court whose verdict was a foregone conclusion.
While the APA Task Force was preparing its bucket of whitewash, gay radicals launched an assault against any mental health professional who attempted to document homosexual aberrancy. Across America psychiatrists and psychoanalysts were shouted down or bodily assaulted in public forums.
Before submitting its final report, the APA Homosexuality Task Force sent a letter to all APA member psychiatrists urging them to “vote” that homosexuality would henceforth be declared not aberrant. Kept secret from the members was the fact that the letter had been written and funded by the politically motivated National Gay Task Force. Believing, falsely, that they were honoring the wishes of their own organization’s elder statesmen, the members voted yes on the motion by a slender margin. Thereafter, the APA removed homosexuality from the 1973 edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
For the first and only time in history a professional mental health organization had voted on the status of a mental illness. Its abrupt reversal was not based on any new scientific evidence. It was the result of a political stunt. Only 25% of the recipients of the original 1973 APA Homosexuality Task Force letter bothered to respond to it. The tally of this skewed “vote” was, therefore, deeply flawed by “volunteer bias”, the very same bias that skewed Alfred Kinsey’s homosexuality studies. In retrospect, it is clear that if the silent majority of the APA membership had responded to the letter, then homosexuality would still be classified as a mental disorder.
Later surveys, which offered APA members confidentiality and freedom from fear of radical gay retaliation, demonstrated that two-thirds of APA psychiatrists held firm in their belief that homosexuality is abnormal and aberrant. Four years after the bogus APA “vote”, the journal Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, published the results of a poll of 2,500 psychiatrists on the subject of homosexuality. These doctors, by a whopping 69% to 18%, confirmed that “Homosexuality was usually a pathological adaptation as opposed to a normal variation.”
The curious bent of the American Psychiatric Association’s leadership surfaced once again on Monday, May 19, 2003 when at a San Francisco symposium, they suggested the possible removal from the forthcoming edition of their manual of mental disorders the following: pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism and sadomasochism. Dr. Charles Moser argued in favor of de-pathologizing pedophilia, suggesting that there was little proof that sex with adults was harmful to minors. It was argued that society should not discriminate against adults who are attracted to children. This argument was embellished with the names of high-functioning public figures who could be classified as pedophiles. Dr. Moser and his co-author Peggy Kleinplatz concluded that, “The situation of the paraphilias at present parallels that of homosexuality in the early 1970s.” In other words, the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder has paved the way for the declassification of pedophilia as a mental disorder and sadistic sexuality as well, which only calls into deeper question the wisdom of the APA leadership. The same moral midgets who sought to normalize homosexuality are now using the very same arguments in an effort to normalize child molestation, creeps who expose their genitals in public, guys who prance around in women’s underwear, sexually aroused shoe sniffers and weirdoes who get a big bang out of torturing others.
Interviews with APA members makes clear that many of them are motivated by a desire to alleviate the social ostracism of homosexuals; their vote had the unintended consequence of lending psychiatric authority to the notion that homosexuals as a group were as mentally healthy as heterosexuals. The bogus vote and its attendant publicity also had a chilling effect on the publication of research suggesting psychological problems associated with homosexuality.
J.Michael Bailey conducted many of the famous “gay twin studies” that gay activists are fond of citing in support of their “I was born this way” theories of gayness. In the 1999 Archives of General Psychiatry, Bailey commented on three published studies of homosexuality (Fergusson, Herrell and Sandfort). He said, “These studies contain arguably the best published data on the association between homosexuality and psychopathology, and both converge on the same unhappy conclusion: homosexual people are at substantially higher risk for some forms of emotional problems, including suicidality, major depression, and anxiety disorder, conduct disorder, and nicotine dependence…The strength of the new studies is their degree of control.”
In a study by A.P. Bell and M.S. Weinberg (1978) the authors conclude that a major reason for gay suicide attempts was the breakup of relationships. The second most common reason was the inability of gays to accept what they have chosen to be. Because gays have more partners than heterosexuals, they also experience more breakups. Long-term gay male relationships are rarely monogamous. Gays have, on average, four times as many partners as heterosexuals and their suicide attempts are proportionally higher. Suicide attempts among gays are about three times more frequent than among heterosexuals. High rates of compulsive sexual behavior and drug use among gays also drive up their suicide statistics.
Social stigma does not appear to be the reason for homosexual mental health problems. Studies comparing the suicide rates of gays in the United States with those of gays in countries renowned for their tolerance of homosexuals, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Denmark, showed no significant difference. Gays in America did not have more psychiatric problems than gays in more gay-friendly environments. In other words, gay problems spring from gay psychology, not from their status as “victims of society.”
Suffice it to say that the homosexual psyche has never been given a clean bill of health by the mental health profession. The decision to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental disorders was made by a splinter faction of the Association’s administrators working in collusion with homosexual activists, who bolstered their star-chamber proceedings with a bogus “vote” secretly funded by gay radicals, to which a scant 25% of APA members bothered to respond. The change was purely political and done in an atmosphere of intimidation. Therefore, the APA vote to drop homosexuality from its list of mental disorders is not an argument in favor of homosexual wedlock.
Oh, Canada!
Ontario and Quebec have the two largest populations of the ten Canadian provinces, and they are the historic trend setters for the rest of Canada’s social agenda. Six provinces have already granted some parental rights to same-sex couples, as do some American states.
On June 17, 2003 the Canadian cabinet approved a new national right of same-sex marriage. The decision to redefine marriage took immediate effect in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, which borders the United States. Once the necessary legislation is drafted, the House of Commons is expected to pass it into law. There is little organized opposition to this radical departure from custom. Gay activists in the United States are declaring that the Canadian example will show the Americans that homosexual wedlock is as good as traditional marriage. Traditional religious perspectives are far less influential in Canada and church attendance is far lower.
The prime minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, said his government would seek the advice of Canada’s Supreme Court in an effort to make the new legislation invulnerable to appeals by provincial governments seeking to invalidate it within their jurisdictions. The conservative premier of Alberta, Ralph Klein, has proposed a legal challenge to exclude his province from the gay-marriage dictate.
Canada’s shift follows that of Belgium and the Netherlands, but few American homosexuals have sought marriages abroad because the marriage law in the Netherlands requires a long residency, and Belgium will only allow marriages of foreign couples from countries that already allow such unions. But Canada is just across the border and it has no restrictions. Said Lavi Soloway, a Canadian-born lawyer and founder of the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force in New York, “What this represents for American couples is an opportunity to easily enter into a legal marriage and come back to the United States with a powerful tool to break down the remaining discrimination here.” Said the New York Times, “To protect religious freedom in Canada, the cabinet decided that the planned federal legislation would allow religious institutions to refuse to conduct same-sex marriages.” Allow religious institutions to refuse? How big-hearted of Big Brother not to compel religious people to perform acts which they hold to be morally repugnant. In June of 2003 a three-member panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal, behaving like philosopher kings, declared that the definition of marriage as a union of a man and a woman, was invalid and must be changed immediately to include people in the grips of same-sex attraction.
As recently as the 1960s Quebec, the prime minister’s home province, was a deeply conservative place where the church was a formative influence in social life and education. Since then the baby-boom generation has evinced a sweet tooth for big-government social programs, secularism, abortion and easy divorce. Church attendance has plunged. Canada’s demographics have changed dramatically since the government of Pierre Trudeau gave a wide-open welcome to Africans, Asians and West Indians in an attempt to fill Canada’s unpopulated hinterland. Eighteen percent of the Canadian population is now foreign born. In a single generation Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, with one third of the population, have become multicultural polyglots. Forty percent of Toronto is foreign born, with radio and television stations broadcasting in thirty languages. There was virtually no debate among Canadians as to whether this seismic shift in their culture and demographics and national identity would be a good thing.
Canada is well on its way to becoming a sprawling cultureless culture, a land of countless ethnic restaurants but devoid of any central unifying social myth. What on Earth does it mean to be a Canadian? Back in the ‘60s, Canadians talked of nurturing their native folkways and becoming as distinctive as the United States, but now they are well along to becoming just another featureless product of globalization. Perhaps this is to be expected. Canada never had a unifying social myth. Most modern nations of the New World were born in rebellion, but Canada is a child of the fear of revolution. Canada was patched together by lawyers who negotiated a series of deals in the 19th and 20th centuries in an effort to build a consensus among the local cultures of disparate provinces to entice them to join the loose confederation with a weak central government that we now call Canada. They have turned their backs on their North American heritage and now look longingly to Europe for social models. Think of Canada as Sweden on the St.Lawrence, but with less distinctivness. None of this keeps the Canadians from feeling vastly superior to Americans. Only the French can top the Canadians for snotty attitudinizing.
In the 1860s, fugitive slaves fled to Canada, but soon returned to join the Union army. In the 1870s, Sitting Bull and his Sioux nation escaped the American cavalry and made Saskatchewan home for a while before returning south. Though neither group found the Canadians particularly welcoming, their presence helped the Canadians form a notion of themselves as morally superior in the way they treat minorities. “We have always prided ourselves as being the northern terminus of the Underground Railroad, so we never stop enjoying embarrassing America as inferior in race relations,” said Austin Clarke, a Canadian novelist, born in Barbados. So now they can cluck their tongues about how the Americans treat homosexuals, who are imagined to be a genuine minority. Besides their shared love of ice hockey and Tim Horton doughnuts, a shared moral smugness is something for the Canadians to cling to.
On September 17, 2003, two gays who had been married under Canadian law were denied entry into the United States because they insisted on filling out a single customs clearance form. “He [the Customs agent] said same-sex marriage is not recognized by the United States of America and we would have to enter as single individuals,” recalled Kevin Bourassa. When Mr. Bourassa objected, the Customs agent’s superior explained to Mr. Bourassa that United States law is governed by the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as “only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.” Beth Poisson, press attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, agreed: “The Customs agent was simply upholding U.S. law.”
Meanwhile, back in New York City, the press carried stories daily about gay couples headed for Toronto. The New York Daily News printed a photo of two gays who intended to wed in Canada and asked the rhetorical question, “But will they really be wed when they get back here?” They answered their own question by observing that “the New York City clerk’s office said yesterday that the most gay newlyweds can hope for here is domestic partner status – which is already available.” When queried on the matter, Patrick Synmoil, counsel to the city clerk, explained, “I think anyone can say with certainty that gay marriage won’t be recognized as a marriage here in New York. It’s against the law.”
The New York Times devoted 24 column inches to the tale of two Cleveland lesbian librarians who planned to get hitched while in Toronto for a librarian’s convention. “They came to Toronto city hall this week, where the rainbow flag now flies on the roof to celebrate Pride Week and the new social revolution going on inside, and filled out a marriage license application, which still has blanks for bridegroom and bride.” Fifty-six-year-old lesbian librarian Linda Chopra said she didn’t expect her Canadian marriage to be recognized in Ohio. “Nevertheless,” the Times tell us, “…she wanted to get married anyway, in part so that when her granddaughter comes to visit, ‘she will have two grandmothers in the same house and know that our relationship is legally acceptable.’” Perhaps we can expect a sequel to the classroom gay-pride classic “Heather Has Two Mommies”, titled “Heather Has Three Grannies”, or maybe four grannies as the case may be. With gay divorce certain to follow gay marriage, poor Heather could end up with five or six “grandmothers” and never have known the love of a grandfather.
The Times enthuses that “Gay and lesbian couples, some from as far away as California and Britain, are coming to Toronto to marry,” to take advantage of the Ontario court decision which, the Times tells us reassuringly, “has been endorsed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien.” What more is there to say on the matter? Homosexual marriage has been endorsed by a left-wing Canadian politician.
The Times goes on to remind us once again that American gay activists “are hopeful that the Canadian marriage license will be a potent legal weapon to test in American courts to win same-sex couples enhanced rights and privileges…”, and adds that the Lawrence decision striking down all sodomy laws “is strengthening gay civil rights groups’ hopes that barriers to same-sex marriage in the United States will also prove vulnerable.” Speaking of gay Americans who come to Canada to acquire marriages, the Times says encouragingly that “they are aware that they are in the vanguard of a movement they hope will eventually bury a taboo that so far has been surmounted only here and in the Netherlands and Belgium.”
Then came a New York Times article titled Now Free to Marry, Canada’s Gays Say, ‘Do I?’ It may have been a sly attempt to make the notion of homosexual wedlock seem less threatening by suggesting that many gays didn’t really want to marry their partners. Writing from a Toronto dateline, Clifford Krauss tells us that when 41-year-old Davis Andrew heard that a court had extended the marriage privilege to homosexuals “he broke into a sweat.” Said Mr. Andrew, “I was dreading the conversation [with my partner]. Personally, I saw marriage as a dumbing down of gay relationships. My dread is that soon you will have a complacent bloc of gay and lesbian soccer moms.” The Times writer adds: “His skepticism about marriage is a recurring refrain among Canadian gay couples, who have not rushed to marry in great numbers in the weeks since June 10, when they became eligible. Rather, the extension of marriage rights has thrown gays here into a heated debate, akin to the one that embroiled the American civil rights movement in the 1960’s over how much ‘integration’ is a good thing – and what gay marriage should consist of.” The report goes on to say that many gays fear that marriage and mainstreaming will erode their cherished notion of themselves as a unique people with a unique culture and history. Respectability, it seems, is a challenge to gay identity. The debate is between those who yearn for acceptance and those who celebrate a flamboyant gay counterculture. Said the Times: “So heated is the conversation that some gay Canadians said in interviews that they would not bring up the topic at dinner parties.”
The editor-in-chief of Fab, a popular gay magazine in Toronto, opined, “I’d be for marriage if I thought gay people would challenge and change the institution and not buy into the traditional meaning of ‘till death do us part’ and monogamy forever. We should be Oscar Wildes and not like everyone else watching the play.” In other words, he believes that gay marriage should threaten the institution of marriage as it exists, should be a sort of Trojan Horse bringing with it a disrespect for monogamy and permanence. The Times observes that “gay men seem more apprehensive about marriage than lesbians…” Well, duh. Gay men outnumber lesbians by at least two to one. In addition the average lesbian respondent claims to have had only ten homosexual encounters. This contrasts wildly with the typical gay male respondent who numbers his sexual encounters in the hundreds and still counting. Promiscuity is the hallmark of male homosexuality and because gay males dominate gay demographics, it will be the gay male sensibility that will most strongly shape the public’s perception of any emerging institution of gay marriage.
Hints of the grotesque parody of traditional marriage that gay marriage could become began to appear in Fab magazine, which caters to Canada’s largest gay community, as the magazine dispensed tips on bridal harnesses and blue leather garters, gay bachelor party strippers, and where to find “black magic flowers.” With is emphasis on fetishwear and pagan symbolism, the trappings of gay wedlock seemed to mock marriage much as the witches’ Sabbath once mocked the Mass. The same issue of Fab included an essay by a sociologist at the University of Toronto, who warned that gay marriage could bring with it a frightening homogenization. Said Rinaldo Walcott: “I can already hear folks saying things like: ‘Why are bathhouses needed? Straights don’t have them.’” He laments, “Will queers now have to live with the heterosexual forms of guilt associated with something called cheating?”
He’s right to be concerned. Any widespread capacity for self-restraint, or even a sense of shame, would put a serious dent in contemporary gay culture. Among gay males, cruising for sex is universal. Anonymous, often wordless, sexual encounters are consummated in lavatories, movie theaters, parked cars, the public parks and, of course, the bathhouses. Two-thirds of gay males have contracted a least one venereal disease at least once. Almost half of white male homosexual respondents, with an average age of 37 years, reported having had at least 500 sex partners. Such outlandish promiscuity is the engine that drove the AIDS epidemic. The average life expectancy for a gay male is now down to 43 years. And it is upon this rickety foundation that the gay community expects to establish an institution of gay marriage?
The Gay Golden Age That Never Was
In their defense of the contemporary gay culture, homosexuals fondly direct our attention to the golden age of homoerotism in classical Greece. They will rattle off the names of historical homosexuals, as if to suggest that modern gays are continuing some noble lineage. The very antiquity of Greek homoerotism seems to cast a patina of respectability over the modern gay counterculture. The openness and visibility of homosexuality in the ancient Greek culture that gifted us so much treasured philosophy, drama, mathematics, logic and ethics seems to argue for our acceptance of homosexuality in our own culture. Indeed, gays argue that if it weren’t for the dark shadow that Jewish and Christian intolerance cast over gay culture, gays today would be basking in society’s warm acceptance of their natural, noble, and homosexual selves. It’s a pretty thought, but it’s hokum.
Contemporary American gay culture bears no resemblance to classical Greek culture. To suggest that it does is a slander against the Greeks. We can take our keynote from Xenophon who, quoting Socrates, asks “Do you think the man is free who is ruled by bodily pleasures and is unable to do what is best because of them?” For the Greeks the essence of manhood lay in self-mastery and restraint. By contrast, America’s gay subculture is a celebration of excess. The compulsive, mechanical and anonymous sexual encounters that characterize gay male behavior today would have disgusted the Greeks, whose conventions proscribed certain sexual acts, extolled restraint and abhorred anonymity. They would have found modern gays contemptible.
It was the abandonment of sexual prohibition in our own culture that encouraged ever greater sensation seeking. Among gays, this quickly led to baroque elaborations of coprophilic behaviors including anus licking (anilingus) and fist fucking. To the Greeks the very idea of a man forcing his hand up another man’s rectum would have been inconceivable. Among the Greeks the passive role in anal intercourse might be played by a woman or a slave, but not by another free man. Only the powerless were the recipients of anal intercourse. It was the excessive compulsions of modern sensation-seeking gays that brought the role of slave back into the homosexual repertoire.
With average gays reporting as many as 500 sex partners, it’s little wonder that AIDS spread across North America in only a few years, starting with a single infected French Canadian airline attendant, whom epidemiologists call Patient Zero. The anus is not a genuine sex organ; it is easily lacerated; it is the perfect pathway for germ transmission. Because of their promiscuity gay males in America now live ridiculously short lives. Gay male sex is uniformly unhealthy. Gay males have strikingly high instances of anal cancer. The list of diseases found with frequency among gay males as a result of their abnormal sexual appetites includes Chlamydia trachomatis, cryptosporidium, giardia lamblia, herpes simplex virus, human immunodeficiency virus, human papilloma virus, isospora belli, microsporisia, gonorrea, viral hepatitis types B and C, and syphilis. Sexual transmission of some of these diseases is almost unknown in the heterosexual population. Gays account for the lion’s share of sexual-transmitted diseases not usually spread by sexual contact including hepatitis A, entamoeba histolytica, Epstein-Barr virus, neisseria meningitides, shigellosis, salmonellosis, pediculosis, scabies and campylobacter.
There is clinical evidence that promiscuous people, in general, are more likely to be antisocial. As the gay sociologist Rotello reminds us: “…the outlaw aspect of gay sexual culture, its transgressiveness, is seen by many men as one of its greatest attributes.” A 1995 study (Ellis et al.) found that 38% of homosexual men seeking treatment for urological problems had antisocial personality disorder, as contrasted with only 2% in the general population. The rate for prison inmates is 50%.
With such a high incidence of antisocial proclivity, it’s no wonder that the gay community was quick to rummage through the Freudian literature in search of self-serving justifications for their inclinations. They then argued that the unconscious mind was a repository of dark forces and it was best to bring them into consciousness and give them expression. And so it was that gay apologists began making claims for the therapeutic benefits of sadomasochism, preposterously calling it “a new dimension of love.” The leather bars and fetishwear that are so prominent a feature of gay culture have little to do with love. It’s all about dominance and submission, a resurgence of the master/slave dynamic. Clearly, the contemporary gay subculture is not a descendant of classical Greek homoerotism. The spiritual godfather of the modern gay scene is the Marquis de Sade.
To legitimize gay marriage would mean accepting this entire gay subculture into the American mainstream, which would not be good for the social health of the nation as a whole. In allowing gay marriage, the rest of society would, in effect, be marrying the homosexual counterculture. The gay community is eager to acquire the legitimacy that a marriage privilege would confer upon it, but gays don’t want the scrutiny that the legislative process would bring. So much of what gays accept as commonplace in their subculture is repulsive to normal people. That’s why homosexuals are thrilled that the gay social agenda is being imposed on American society by overreaching judges. The last thing gays want is a close examination of their behavior, their values, their mental health. But such a detailed scrutiny is exactly what is needed in the gay marriage debate. Otherwise, America may wake up one morning to discover that it has become the Bride of Gay Frankenstein.
Are Black People Really the Moral Equivalent of Homosexuals?
The crown jewel of all the gay-activist arguments in favor of homosexual wedlock is the one that likens black people to homosexuals. According to gays, both blacks and gays share histories of exclusion and denigration; both blacks and gays have been denied their civil rights. The argument rounds itself out with a reminder that laws once prevented wedlock between blacks and whites and, by the same logic that led to the repeal of such laws, so must we now admit homosexual wedlock.
Needless to say, black folks, many of them deep-water Christians and Muslims, are not flattered by this comparison, nor should they be. Closer examination shows the comparison to be superficial and the argument to be without substance. To understand what makes the black and gay communities radically different requires a little history lesson. Please bear with me.
A Little History Lesson
When European explorers first encountered black Africans they were deeply impressed by two things: their strikingly different physical appearance and the primitive circumstances in which they lived. Everywhere the Europeans turned in sub-Saharan (black) Africa they found tribal societies that had no numbers beyond one and two. The wheel and the plow, which had been known for thousands of years outside black Africa, were nowhere to be seen. These inventions are considered important for the transition from simple hunter-gatherer subsistence living. The invention of writing, which is critical to the development of any philosophical tradition, first appeared in Sumeria around 3500 BC. Even so, literacy could be found in black Africa only in small Islamic outposts such as Timbuktu and the Christian culture in Ethiopia. It all begged the question: Why were black Africans so backward?
Today we have a theory of African delayed development that is elegant in its simplicity and has the further virtue of sidestepping the fever swamp of human genetics completely; it is based solely on geology and human nature. Here’s the theory:
The African continent is an enormous uplifted raft of ancient submarine limestone. Because of this the coastline of Africa is characterized by steep escarpments, which provide few decent harbors. The lack of harbors discouraged the development of maritime skills such as ship building and exploration; therefore, contacts with the greater world were foreclosed. Africa has many majestic rivers, but they are not navigable from the coastline inward. Because of the uplifted geology, black Africa’s rivers are characterized by impassable cataracts and waterfalls, which discouraged river trading and inter-cultural communication even within Africa.
Across the top of black Africa lies the daunting barrier of the great Sahara, which also served to isolate black Africa from cultural developments in the Near East, the Far East and northern Africa. The Arabs were the first to cross this vast wasteland from the northern side, using domesticated dromedaries, in the fourth century AD. Clearly, the geography of Africa was an impediment to the cultural development of black Africans.
Europe, by contrast, is low, with countless fine harbors and long, wide navigable rivers that encouraged trading and communication along routes that extended far to the east. Europeans developed maritime and trading traditions that disseminated any new invention to the benefit of all Europe. It is no accident that the Europeans came to embrace a new idea: progress, and the things which that idea encouraged: science, invention, literacy and exploration.
That’s the theory, cultural isolation is a roadblock to cultural evolution, the most isolated people are also the most primitive people. The aboriginal people of Australia and the natives of Tierre del Fuego, at the southern most tip of South America, shared with the black Africans the consequences of extreme isolation. Europeans were blessed by their geography, black Africans were blighted by theirs.
And so it was in the fifteenth century that a people whose cultural inheritance included almost a hundred universities, fifteen thousand titles in print, modern business methods such as checks, bills of exchange, insurance, and double-entry bookkeeping, and which had mechanical clocks and precision instruments and had harnessed wind and water power to saw lumber and stone, pump water, grind grain and countless other tasks, came face to face with the stone-age black Africans. The first response of the Europeans was shock; their curious minds longed for a theory to explain black backwardness. Sadly, the theories that emerged and were promulgated my some of the most learned men of Europe, blamed black backwardness on qualities inherent in the Africans themselves, and so the theories became racial theories, which would later be used to undergird racist theories of white supremacy. This is how the black-white relationship got off to a bad start from the very beginning.
Slavery in black Africa predated the arrival of the Europeans by millennia, so when some Dutchmen sitting in an Amsterdam coffeehouse hatched the idea for the triangular trade, they knew exactly where to go to buy slaves: Africa. They went to Africa because that’s where the slave markets already existed. Their idea was to buy slaves in Africa, swap them for rum and molasses in the American tropics, and then sell the rum and molasses for a profit in Europe. They would then spend their profits in the African slave markets and repeat the triangular trade indefinitely.
The consequence of all this for white folks living in America was that they had few, if any, encounters with literate black people; black people seemed childlike, although some might display signs of cleverness and were deemed capable of God’s redemption. These childlike qualities were used by slave masters to justify the institution of slavery. What they could not acknowledge was the power of the institution itself to make black people appear to be the intellectual and moral inferiors of whites, for slaves have no incentive to learn skills, become self-reliant, or better themselves in any way. What incentive does a slave have to be industrious, knowing that the fruits of his labors will be stolen from him? What decision-making capacity does someone have who has never been allowed to make his own decisions?
Long after emancipation the deforming influences of slavery, together with commonplace illiteracy and rustic rural manners, made many blacks socially repellent to white people and to sophisticated blacks as well. Only since the late 20th century have the great majority of black Americans been able to demonstrate their full intellectual and creative powers. The result has been the realization of Booker T. Washington’s prediction that blacks would achieve social success as whites witnessed black achievement.
So what does all this have to do with the debate over gay marriage? Just this: we can follow the trajectory of black people’s social status from the first encounter with Europeans to the present moment. Over that span of time blacks have retained a cultural distinctiveness while simultaneously becoming ever less alien. Contemporary blacks have far more in common with their white neighbors than with their illiterate animist ancestors, or even with African tribesmen today. They are modern Americans. As both races advanced and converged in social sophistication, the eugenic ordinances that were meant to protect society from the flaws of negritude came to seem quaintly antique. Somewhere along the way the lingering backwardness of some blacks became uncoupled from the idea of race and they became merely “the disadvantaged,” in need of a job and some social skills.
In short, the notion of interracial marriage became less strange as the races ceased to be strangers. This form of exogamy is still far from commonplace because most people prefer the rhythms and shared assumptions of their home cultures, but black people, as a group, are no longer misidentified as the moral inferiors of any other racial group. The question before us now is the moral equivalency of blacks and homosexuals.
Why Homosexuals Are Not the Moral Equivalent of Black People
The relationship of homosexuals to the greater society is not at all akin to the relationship of blacks to the greater society. The social histories of blacks and homosexuals are wildly different. The importation of African slaves was outlawed in 1808. In the 196 years since then, which is less than three human lifetimes (72 years each) laid end to end, the social stock of American blacks has rocketed upward. Increased education and expanding opportunities have allowed blacks to demonstrate their intellectual, artistic and moral worth. The entire nation has been witness to this historic social wonder which even now continues its forward progress.
There is no such brightening perception of homosexuals. On the contrary, the more detailed information the average citizen is provided about contemporary homosexual behavior, the more alien and unlikable homosexuals become. The social tolerance of gays has only gotten as far as it has because of a de facto “don’t ask/don’t tell” tradition among the well bred. It’s time to shed that tradition and shine a white-hot spotlight on homosexual behavior; what we learn will illuminate the true essence of the homosexual psyche. Only then can each citizen make an informed opinion about the wisdom of folding the homosexual counterculture into mainstream American culture, elevating homosexual wedlock to the level of a sacrament, legitimizing homosexual behaviors, values and perspectives, and handing homosexuals the keys to every adoption agency in the land.
We should note in passing that homosexuality is not unitary. There are at least two homosexualities, and perhaps several subcatagories of each. The biological and social events that shape the homosexual mind are different for each sex and the results are distinctive. The norms of lesbian behavior and lesbian culture are very different from those of male homosexuals. Had they decided to go it alone, lesbians might have gained far more sympathy, but they have thrown in their lot with gay males, bisexuals and the transgendered, and so their destiny will depend on how much warmth the average person can gin up for anal erotics and surgically manufactured gender replicants. Homosexuals are a mere two percent of the total population and lesbians are only about one third of that two percent, so lesbians are a freakishly small percentage of the population. In the arguments over homosexual wedlock, lesbians can pretty much be ignored because it is the far larger and far more exotic population of male homosexuals who will shape the perception of homosexual wedlock in the public mind.
The Kinsey Institute study Homosexualities, which was published in 1978, revealed that nearly half of their white male homosexual sample reported at least 500 different sex partners, and this at an average age of 37 years. According to the Kinsey Institute, one third of gay men frequented bathhouses regularly and 62 percent sometimes used commercial settings for anonymous gay sex. The report confirmed that cruising, the hunt for sex with strangers, was a near universal habit of the gay male population. The authors did their best to put a happy face on these encounters by telling us that the gay sex seekers “spent at least several hours with their partners.” Does this sound like a population that could make anything but a mockery of marriage? Now try to imagine what the moral status of the black population would be if a report revealed that the average black male had a sexual history of at least 500 women? Indeed, the rising social status of blacks has mirrored the declining perception of blacks as promiscuous people. This perception was planted in the minds of many whites by the loose behavior and rustic manners of the waves of blacks who flooded northward after emancipation. No one was more shocked by these newcomers than were the long-acculturated and socially integrated northern blacks. Black newspaper editorials roundly denounced the loose morals of the newcomers. It was the natural human desire not to be near such randy people that led to the creation of the first de facto urban ghettos for blacks, a phenomenon that had not existed in the North before that time. It was the birth of redlining.
Given the history of black people and their hard-won social status, the sudden demand for social acceptance by a notoriously promiscuous homosexual population strikes normal heterosexuals, white and black alike, as impudent counter jumping. Even the most sympathetic sociologists paint a bleak portrait of gay culture. Land Humphreys was an Episcopal minister for ten years before becoming a graduate student in sociology in the 1960s. He devoted two years of his life to observing homosexual males sucking on each other’s penises in public toilets. The homosexuals entered the toilets as strangers and performed sex acts on each other without uttering a word. Gays euphemistically call these toilets “tearooms.” Humphreys’ doctoral dissertation was later published under the title The Tearoom Trade: Anonymous Sex in Public Places.
Mr. Humphreys later said, “I have no moral or intellectual objection to what goes on in the “tearooms”…I do have a moral objection to the way in which society reacts to those who take part in that action.” Humphreys had gone native. The notion of public decency doesn’t seem to have entered his mind; the soulless vacancy of these animalistic encounters completely escaped his seminary-trained intellect. Humphreys carried on his work in the hope of influencing public policy.
Mr. Humphreys has ideological compatriots at the New York Times. Recently the paper ran a nostalgia piece about a gay bathhouse in Harlem, “the only one in the city that caters to gay blacks” and “has been operating continuously since 1893.” In fact, the Mount Morris Turkish Baths was built in the 1890s by downtown doctors as a health spa for respiratory patients; it began attracting homosexuals in the 1930s. In the sepia-tinted prose of the New York Times, “These days, it is one of the few vestiges of Harlem’s gay life, which reached its apotheosis when the poet Countee Cullen married Nina Yolande DuBois, the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois, in 1928, but two months later sailed off to Europe with his best man.”
A sign in the Baths reads “No sex permitted”, but below it is the printed admonition “Dispose of used condoms carefully.” An attendant sits behind a metal grate accepting hourly fees for lockers and cramped wooden chambers that are furnished with nothing but a single iron-framed bed. Said the Times, the bedrooms are “not much bigger than telephone booths, which once had holes drilled in their walls to facilitate anonymous sex.” Holes in the walls? It would be more accurate to call such impersonal sex “reptilian.”
Five nights a week a doctor oversees lectures in a back room on “topics of particular interest to gay men” such as “gay men raising families.” The message here is that homosexuals can raise families without foreswearing life-threatening sex acts with lots of total strangers. It’s a frightening glimpse of what twisted parodies of traditional marriage that gay wedlock would become.
In conclusion, to equate the moral status of blacks with that of homosexuals is preposterous. The oppression of blacks began with a misapprehension of their true nature and was later sustained by the self-serving interests of slave owners. The primitive circumstances of slavery and Jim Crow delayed black development. Today, finally, we see the flowering of black potential. The convergence of the races, as both races became better educated and socially sophisticated, was to be expected. There is no moral disparity between the races.
Homosexuals, by contrast, are not even a genuine minority, not a race, not a nationality, but just a group of people with odd proclivities, anomalous perspectives, and the distinction of being considered mentally disordered by many mental health professionals. Homosexuals are held at arm’s length because normal people find the intimate details of their behavior to be something somewhere between disturbed and disgusting. Homosexuals are unloved because their behavior, which reflects their moral essence, is repellent to normal people.
Homosexuals are not the only anomalous humans to envision themselves as a victimized minority. Many deaf people now consider themselves to belong to a unique culture of the deaf. Their literature rails against the use of cochlear implants to give the sense of hearing to deaf children, an act which deaf militants liken to a kidnapping of one of their cultural tribesmen. Should society knuckle under to their demands and deny deaf children the gift of hearing?
And then there are the anorexics who argue that their shrunken bodies are an aesthetic choice, freely chosen, and that all attempts at intervention are a form of oppression. They have a website so they must be a real minority, right? Shouldn’t we all just accept their vision of themselves as a minority and give them their civil right to starve themselves.
The boldness of these special-interest groups is the organic consequence of the decades-long refinement of American identity politics: If you have a personal quirk, then make it the nucleus of your identity, then unite with others who share your quirk, and then declare yourselves to be a “minority” deserving of rights, recognition, political power and lots of taxpayer-funded benefits. That’s the gay movement in a nutshell.
Bear in mine that item number two of the explicit Kirk-and-Pill gay agenda is “Portray gays as victims.” Gays want you to identify their discontents with genuine black tribulation. In short, homosexuals are trying to hop a free ride on the back of black oppression. Black folks aren’t falling for it. Every public opinion poll demonstrates that the majority of black Americans are solidly against a homosexual marriage privilege.
Twilight of the Gays?
Is it prudent to establish a gay marriage privilege at the very moment in history when genetic screening holds forth the possibility of eliminating homosexuality by the year 2080? If lesbianism is caused by elevated testosterone levels in a pregnant woman’s blood, then a simple blood test would identify unborn daughters who were “at risk” for lesbianism. Herein lays the possibility of eradicating gayness within a single human lifetime (75 years). If prenatal screening for homosexuality began in the near future, then by the year 2080 homosexuality could become as rare as polio. Certainly, every mother wants her baby to be perfect. Even Rosie O’Donnell has publicly affirmed that she wouldn’t want any of her children to be homosexuals. The only thing that would prevent a woman from aborting an imperfect fetus would be her deep moral conviction that abortion was wrong, which leads us to the irony that the most adamant defenders of the someday-to-be-gay unborn would be religious conservatives. The great slaughter of the pre-gay unborn would come at the insistence of liberal pro-choice moms in the privacy of their doctor’s offices. No one would ever be the wiser; the pro-choice moms would keep their liberal credentials intact. Only the dwindling numbers of youthful gay arrivals to the urban gay ghettos would signal the fatal decline of the gay subculture.
Is this so unimaginable? The cover story of the January 26, 2004 Newsweek was Girl or Boy?, subtitled “Now You Can Chose. But Should You? The New Science of Sex Selection.” Inside is an article about the attractive new possibilities of genetic testing that sprawls across ten pages. The article is titled Brave New Babies; it touts the virtues of a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). The breathless prose is a form of salesmanship. Here’s a sample: ”The brave new world is definitely here. After 25 years of staggering advances in reproductive medicine – first test-tube babies, then donor eggs and surrogate mothers – technology is changing baby-making in a whole new way. No longer can science simply help couples have babies they want. Choosing gender may obliterate one of the fundamental mysteries of procreation, but for people who have grown accustomed to taking 3-D ultrasounds of fetuses, learning the baby’s sex within weeks of conception and scheduling convenient delivery dates, it’s simply the next logical step. That gleeful exclamation, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” may soon just be a quaint reminder of how random births used to be.”
Later on the article strikes a cautionary note: ”The ability to create baby Jack or baby Jill opens a high-tech can of worms. While the advances have received kudos from grateful families, they also raise loaded ethical questions about whether science is finally crossing a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Even fertility specialists are divided over whether choosing a male or female embryo is acceptable. If couples can request a baby boy or girl, what’s next on the slippery slope of modern reproductive medicine? Eye color? Height? Intelligence?” Or maybe sexual orientation?
Now available at limited clinics nationwide, PGD was designed to diagnose genetic diseases in embryos, but patients have begun asking about gender “and it’s their right to do so, many doctors say” according to Newsweek. According to PGD expert Yury Verlinsky of the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago, “I tell them it’s normal and I tell them it’s male or female. It’s their embryo. I can’t tell them which one to transfer [into the uterus].” Indeed not. It’s their embryo. It’s a free country after all.
So the stage has been set to identify proto-gay fetuses and thereby shrink America’s gay community by the silent and unseen technique of fetal attrition. Of course, it wouldn’t be called gay fetal attrition; it would be called something upbeat, such as Flawless Baby Selection. What sort of heartless monster would deny a mother the gift of a flawless baby?
None of this speculation has been lost on the gay community. Just punch the words “homosexual” and “genetic research” into the Google search engine and up pop hundreds of web pages, many created by homosexuals, and almost all of which point to some genetic involvement in the genesis of most homosexuality. Male homosexuality seems to be most strongly genetically determined, lesbianism less so. In any case, this research highlights the fact that the gay community is populated by the reproductive fallout of straight-community lovemaking and romantic idealism. Therefore, the future existence of the gay community may ultimately come to depend upon the degree to which gays offend that same straight community’s romantic idealism. The institution of marriage is central to the romantic vision the straight community has of itself. Homosexuals will offend these people at their peril. Powerful commercial interests are poised to make a fortune offering gender-orientation screening to every worried pregnant woman. It would be a more final solution to the gay marriage ruckus if the gay community simply faded away; it would save everyone the ordeal of putting a marriage amendment in the Constitution.
After decades of listening to liberals insist that any woman has a right to abort her unborn child for any reason, it will be interesting to hear what special defense will be offered for the protection of someday-to-be-gay fetuses. After being told by liberals that religious people, Jews, Christians and Muslims, have a “fetus fixation,” what will be the liberal’s argument against the harvesting of proto-homosexuals? In a brave new liberal world without moral absolutes the one-day-to-be-gay fetus is fair game for any abortionist. It’s a world the liberals created. The irony is tremendous. So, will the gay community die laughing?
The Crypto-Eugenicists
America’s most industrious abortion provider is the Planned Parent Federation of America, which has 129 affiliates and operates 875 abortion mills. The abortion business has made the PPFA rich and influential. The Federation uses its profits to aggressively advertise its services.
Before the Second World War, the Federation called itself the American Birth Control League. The name change, which came during the war, was a political necessity prompted by founder Margaret Sanger’s well publicized admiration for Adolph Hitler’s racial politics and eugenics programs to purify human heredity. Margaret’s fellow board members, Lothrup Stoddard and C.C. Little, were closely identified with their racist perspectives. Margaret herself was a guest speaker at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silverlake, NJ in 1926.
Margaret Sanger advocated the sterilization of the “unfit.” She was convinced that the “inferior races” were “human weeds” and a “menace to civilization.” The American Birth Control League sought to vanquish poverty by eliminating the poor and the undesirable, especially Jews, Slavs and Italians. And then there was the notorious Negro Project.
Under Sanger’s leadership the League’s publication, Birth Control Review embraced eugenicist perspectives. The Review gave a glowing assessment of Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy. Stoddard himself hailed the eugenic programs of the Third Reich as “scientific.” For Planned Parenthood to now claim that their founding angel was not a eugenicist and a racist, but merely an innocent who had absorbed the jargon of her times, is preposterous.
Given Planned Parenthood’s racist roots, its enthusiastic promotion of eugenicist programs around the world, and its reliance on an archipelago of abortion mills for its enrichment, does anyone imagine they would long resist the temptation to provide pregnant women with so profitable a service as prenatal gender-inclination genetic screening? There would be “counseling”, of course, before the decision to “cull” or “harvest” the predisposed-to-be-gay fetuses.
In a world awash with moral relativism, the abortion chamber as moral vacuum chamber is the organic consequence of decades of placing the selfish desires of individuals, disguised as an argument about “individual rights”, before the moral health of the human community as a whole. Once the slogan Abortion On Demand became standard procedure, any defense against the obliteration of the gay community by the method of fetus harvesting collapsed.
Past attempts to shrink the size of the black community by the promotion of birth control and abortion were limited by the sentiments and scruples of black women. The black community held within itself the power to resist the harvesting of black fetuses. The gay community has not such internal defense. The gay community is not biologically self-sustaining; it’s a by-product of heterosexual culture. All the important reproductive decisions are made outside the gay community. What will happen to the gay community when those people the gays mockingly call “the breeders” make the decision to stop breeding gays and lesbians?
Stalking the Gay Gene
Is there a scientific basis for such a screening program? Is there a “gay gene” in the human genome that could “red flag” a fetus as a future invert? There is certainly a vast literature on the subject, much of it written by gays who are eager to convince us that there is indeed a genetic foundation for homosexuality, that homosexuality is inborn and therefore “natural” and therefore also “good”, or at least not bad. History may prove these gay authors to have been too clever by half.
Much of this literature points to the X chromosome of male humans as the location of the mutated gene, or constellation of genes, that predispose males to homosexuality. The tone of the geneticists is one of professional restraint masking an ill-concealed giddiness. And why not? These are heady times for geneticists: the genome has been mapped, there are wonders to be discovered, there is fame and fortune to be made.
Take, for instance, Mr. Shang-Ding Zhang, a biologist at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland. Mr. Shang-Ding works with fruit flies, those promiscuous darlings of genetics researchers for almost a hundred years. Normally, male fruit flies can’t show enough enthusiasm for the females of their species. But that was before Zhang crashed the party or, rather, caused the male fruit flies to change their party affiliation. Mr. Shang-Ding and his lab partner, biologist Ward Odenwald, transplanted one gene into the male flies and that was sufficient to produce homosexual behavior. The male flies ignored the females, they linked up end-to-end in big circles or sinuous conga lines, buzzing their love buzz while lurching forward and rubbing their genitals against the male fly in front of them. Without a hint of humor, Mr. Odenwald says the fruit flies are gay. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1995). Their work is of relevance because there are related genes in humans.
By analyzing genetic markers in pairs of homosexual brothers scientists at the National Institutes of Health were able to localize the region corresponding to sexual orientation to a tiny segment of the X chromosome. They surmise that the key to male homosexuality lies in this region. The chief author of this study, Dr. Dean Hamer, Ph.D., announced, “The region that we’ve discovered represents a significant variation in the human genetic repertoire. If the gene itself can be isolated, then it will be important to understand how it interacts with other genes, the brain, and the environment to influence a trait as complex as human sexuality.”
Dr. Hamer’s research, reported in the journal Science, found that 33 of 49 pairs of gay brothers had identical regions on the tip of the X chromosome, which strongly suggested that one or more of the genes in this region influence sexual preference. Dr. Hamer and others have suggested patenting a possible genetics test and then preventing its use. Dr. Hamer naively assumes that legislation and law enforcement could regulate such an enticing biotechnology. The use of sex selection techniques for the purpose of planning abortions is illegal in India and the People’s Republic of China, but the practice is commonplace in those countries. In societies where it is commonplace for gays to say they wouldn’t choose to be gay if they could make such a choice and where gays say they wouldn’t want their children to be gay, what incentive would legislators have to suppress gender-proclivity genetic screening?
A Limp-Wristed Defense
Gays have followed these developments with rapt attention. Their anxiety was captured by playwright Jonathan Tolins in his 1993 drama Twilight of the Golds, which was recast four years later as a made-for-Showtime movie starring Jennifer (Flashdance) Beals. The hook of the story is that pregnant Suzanne Stein (Beals) discovers, through genetic screening, that her future child will probably be a homosexual some day. Her brother is gay, a fact that has caused her parents considerable unhappiness. Her husband doesn’t want a gay son. What should she do?
I bought the DVD in the hope that the playwright would mount a spirited defense of Suzanne’s developing fetus. Well…, I want my money back. To quote from gay movie reviewer Michael Fox’s review on the gay website Planet Out.com, “Tolins’s play…grounds the abstract debate in an annoying family of self-centered country club Jews. The recipe for “drama” here consists of one part childhood resentment, two parts screeching shouting match and one part Hallmark treacle…Miscasting of the Year Award, Ethnic Division, goes to Brendan Fraser (George of the Jungle) as Beals’s earnest gay brother: He’s borderline convincing as a homosexual, but as a Jew? Maybe after another 20 generations of intermarriage and assimilation, but not now.” Bitchy and to the point.
No moral arguments are presented; no one says that aborting the fetus would be wrong. They are all liberals; all their ethics are situational. In a brief cameo, an unrecognizable Jack Klugman appears as Suzanne’s aged, yarmulke-wearing, father-in-law. He rants that his son is “playing God” down at the laboratory, but his displeasure is aimed at the genetic research, not at any future abortion. He seems more concerned about the inquiry into human genetics than about the application of its revelations.
In the end, the unborn child is spared because of Suzanne’s love for her gay brother, played with puppy-dog sincerity by Mr. Fraser. It’s a Pyrrhic victory for Suzanne, whose marriage dissolves when she decides to bear her child. The implications of the application of genetic research for the future of homosexuals as a group goes unmentioned. The playwright is ethically unequipped to challenge the “do your own thing” ethos of the gay subculture. What should have been a polemic is served to us as a schmaltzy mood piece that fails to convince us that aborting the proto-gay unborn would be improper. Is it morally reprehensible or common sense to consider an abortion when the offspring will spend his lifetime as a homosexual?
In the current contest over the ethics of fetal-tissue research, it is the liberal camp that is shouting the loudest in favor of an all-out exploration and exploitation of the flesh of the human unborn. On what possible grounds could such people defend an exception for the pre-gay unborn in a debate about abortion? Genocide is the slaughter of living persons, but the liberals have adamantly rejected the position that the unborn are people, therefore they cannot argue that the eradication of homosexuality by genetic screening and abortion is genocide. If it isn’t murder and it isn’t illegal, then what is it? Impoliteness?
The future of homosexuality itself may soon be in question. Does it make sense to distort the institution of marriage to accommodate a desire for social acceptance by a splinter faction of homosexuals when homosexuals themselves could become as rare as pterodactyls by the year 2080?
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2004
March 13th, 2004