Few Americans will escape the consequences of the expanding gay comfort zone. If you read newspapers or magazines, if you own a television, if you own a computer, if your children attend a public school, if you attend a church, then the quality of your life will be affected by the gay social agenda. Gay perspectives and gay sensibilities have already seeped into every medium of communication; the most remote hamlet, whistle stop and crossroad is now within earshot of a transforming homosexual remodeling of traditional America.
An enthusiastic architect of this transformation is Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the most influential person on the editorial side of the New York Times. Arthur is the executive editor, what other papers call the editor-in-chief. He succeeded his father, who was affectionately nicknamed “Punch.” When Arthur Sulzberger the Second took command as over-boss of the Times he was not-so-affectionately nicknamed “Pinch”, a name that Arthur the Younger detests. The Times is now a virtual Sulzberger family plaything. It is also the most influential newspaper on this planet.
“Pinch” Sulzberger displays none of the easy open-mindedness of his predecessors; he's a tightly regimented Left-wing ideologue. Back in the 60s, Arty Sulzberger was a big fan of the communist Viet Cong. After one of his arrests at an anti-war demonstration, his exasperated father asked him point blank: “If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?” 'Lil Arthur responded immediately that he definitely wanted to see the communist from North Vietnam pump a bullet into the American kid.* All these decades later, the over-boss of the New York Times is still committed to all the jive nonsense about “liberation” that he sucked up in the dope-soaked 60s.
Why should you care what Arthur Sulzberger thinks? After all, 99.5% of Americans don't read the New York Times. Here’s why: the Times is America’s most influential newspaper because America’s most influential people read it religiously. This small, well-positioned and dedicated group of people has a wildly disproportionate influence on our common culture. Every editor is America reads the New York Times. For them, the Times is a guide to what is fashionable and important, it is also a template, a model, for how to shape, edit, massage and present to you the latest liberal party line on issues such as racial preferences, abortion, and homosexuality.
In his book Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite, Bernard Goldberg, a 28-year veteran correspondent at CBS News and the winner of seven Emmy Awards, tells us that “...the New York Times does indeed occupy a unique place in American journalism. And it’s not just because its columns are syndicated to hundreds of local papers around the country. It’s mostly because it sets the agenda for so many other news outlets, especially the networks where most Americans get their world and national news. The fact is, the Big Three news networks wouldn’t know what to put on the air without it. As I’ve said in the past, if the New York Times went on strike tomorrow morning, they’d have to cancel the CBS, NBC, and ABC evening newscasts tomorrow night.” (p.58-9) This wouldn’t be so horrible if the New York Times hadn’t become such a doctrinaire politically-correct parody of its former self under the prissy domination of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.
To illustrate the grip that the Times has on the collective psyche of the network talking heads, Mr. Goldberg recalls the producer who approached Mike Wallace of CBS News with a story proposal. Mike Wallace said he wasn’t “comfortable” with the story line. When asked, “What would make you comfortable?” Wallace responded, “To read it in the New York Times.” Says Goldberg, “Nine months later -- nine months after CBS News began checking the story out -- the Times got around to doing it. Wallace, true to his word, suddenly was interested, and they went out and did the story for 60 Minutes. That’s what the New York Times means to television journalists, even those of Mike Wallace’s stature.” (p.61) Driving his point home, Mr.Goldberg tells us that “If the Times decrees a story important, by definition it is important. And when the Times ignores a story -- or a book or a social trend or an idea -- then it is invisible.” He goes on: “On a typical morning, this is how assignment editors and producers at the network news divisions begin their day. Step one: They open up the New York Times. Step two: They scan the paper for stories to put on their nightly newscasts. Step three: They get one of their high priced reporters (who is in his or her office also reading the New York Times) on the phone -- a reporter who may not have come up with even one original story idea in his entire network career (I mean that literally) -- and tells him or her to go out and do the New York Times story. Step four: He or she does, and that evening a video version of the Times story is on the air.” And that’s what you and your family and your community are exposed to day after day in your local newspaper and on your television: countless recreations of New York Times-inspired stories that shape public opinion about human conduct, morals, and sexuality. As Bernard Goldberg reminds us, reading the New York Times is like taking a PC bath.
The former culture editor of the New York Times, Hilton Kramer, recalls how that once-great newspaper lapsed from a two-section newspaper that emphasized real news, to a multi-section lifestyle publication. Says Kramer, “Well, as soon as you move into lifestyle journalism, it’s basically all opinion. Today there are lifestyle stories on page one almost every day. And lifestyle is an inherently liberal concept – it’s a term that you only hear conservatives use sarcastically, because it implies perpetual change and the denigration of traditional standards. When standards change, they very rarely change for the better.”
The downward slide of the Times coincided with the rise of various “liberation” movements in the 60s and 70s. Feminism in particular waxed the skids beneath the paper’s downhill run. Bernard Goldberg reminds us, “As the women's movement picked up steam, its appeal was precisely to the sorts of people who comprise the Times core constituency -- privileged liberals who like to see themselves as cutting-edge and socially aware.” Subsequently the Times descended from being responsibly liberal to being affectedly hip and aggressively activist. Henceforth, neutrality was a dirty word, a sure sign of a less-than-total commitment to the overthrow of traditional forms of thought and behavior. It was in the midst of this ferment that the ideological “Pinch” Sulzberger took hold of the levers of power at the New York Times. "Lil Arthur is the perfectly modern metrosexual, dedicated to every possible permutation of human diversity other than intellectual diversity. He's the perfect PC fashion plate, a light year wide and a nanometer deep.
So this is why you need to worry: Arthur Sulzberger, the perfect PC Manhattan metrosexual, the leftist who wanted to see the American kid shot in the belly, is now the commander of the most influential propaganda machine in America. He has the power to make your life a torment. He’s a motivated visionary. He wants to transform your world. Among Arthur’s pet projects is the uncritical promotion of every self-serving item on the gay agenda. He is doing this in every section of his re-vamped, wall-to-wall lifestyles, publication. As an illustration of just how reckless and brainless his promotion of sexual oddity has become, let us now examine a single issue of the New York Times.
Sunday, May 9th, 2004
The editors of the New York Times know exactly how to control how many readers will take notice of an article. Determining factors include whether the article is toward the front of the newspaper or farther to the back, whether the article is on the right-hand page or on the left, and whether the article is above or below the fold. Companion graphics, such as cartoons, maps, charts or suggestive illustrations, are helpful attention grabbers. Which day of the week the article appears is also a powerful determinant in how many people will take notice of a news item. Saturday is a particularly poor day for readership. So, if the editors of the New York Times wanted to bury good news about President Bush’s tax-cutting strategy, they might place it far to the back of a Saturday issue, below the fold and without any graphic companions.
When the ideologically-driven staff of the New York Times want to make absolutely certain that the maximum number of readers will absorb their message, they place favored articles in prominent locations in their Sunday edition. The Sunday issue is the one that people take home and leaf through, section by section, at their leisure; it’s the most thoroughly picked-over issue of the week. The included magazine section of the Times is an especially choice location for any article.
Armed with these insights, we can only marvel at the four articles in support of the homosexual social agenda that appeared in the May 9th, 2004, Sunday edition of the New York Times. Two of the articles were explicitly about homosexuality, the other two were covertly supportive of the gay agenda. Three of the four articles received the best possible positions in the coveted magazine section.
The most ink went to a gush-piece profile of Mary Bonauto, a lesbian lawyer for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), referred to by the Times as a “public interest law office.” In 1997, Bonauto and two other lesbian lawyers filed a lawsuit assailing Vermont’s exclusion of homosexuals from the institution of civil marriage. The case went to the liberal Vermont Supreme Court which, in December 1999, ruled in favor of the homosexual challenge. The court “invited” the legislature to devise a remedy and the result was “civil unions” which granted homosexuals all of the legal benefits of marriage while withholding the name marriage. Mary Bonauto subsequently filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts on behalf of seven same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses, a case known as Goodridge v. Department of Public Health which resulted in the liberal jurists of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court transforming the American social landscape with a dictate that homosexuals be granted a marriage privilege, the legislative process and the will of the people be damned.
The Times then tells us that public officials in San Francisco, Portland, Ore., New York State and New Jersey were “inspired” to dispense marriage licenses to homosexuals and that a “political backlash” culminated in President Bush calling for a federal constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The Times writer repeatedly likens the Goodridge decision to Brown v. Board of Education which ended de jure racial segregation in public schools. He quotes Kevin Cathcart of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund who remarked that once fully credentialed gay marriages became a reality “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” Lesbian lawyer Mary Bonauto tells us that her work with GLAD taught her “how to build, brick by brick, protections for gay folks.” This is the same incrementalism favored by Lambda Legal.
The author of this article, titled “Toward a More Perfect Union,” says that “In the early 90's, the strategic and political discussions among gay lawyers about marriage were intense. The most outspoken advocate was Evan Wolfson, a Lambda lawyer who had written a prescient student paper at Harvard Law School in 1983 titled ‘Same-Sex Marriage and Morality: The Human Rights Vision of the Constitution.’” The author of the Times article, David J. Garrow, goes on to compare this student paper to another obscure article by a little-known lawyer that “first set forth the constitutional game plan that Thurgood Marshall followed all the way to Brown v. Board of Education.” It’s yet another sly attempt to falsely liken the black race to a patchwork coalition of odd sexualities that has given itself the name “gay community.” At its biological foundation the “gay Community” is no more than a grab bag of random sexual mutations and fetal chemical-exposure accidents. To liken this conglomeration of the developmentally wounded to the sons and daughters of Africa, to that vast and biologically whole population that to this day occupies the cradle of all humanity, is by turns, laughable and insulting. It’s another sad attempt by homosexuals to wrap their social agenda in a cloak of borrowed nobility.
The author lets drop that during these lawyerly discussions in the early 90s “Some of them argued that marriage was so unappealing an institution that access to it should not be a gay civil rights priority...” These voices are seldom heard today in part because the writers of advocacy articles confine their call lists of people-to-be-quoted to those who will predictably offer supportive quotations, and partly because the vast number of homosexuals who scoff at marriage still want a gay marriage privilege established in the law as an emblem of homosexual legitimacy. Legitimacy is their passport to the colonization of every American social institution. The argument over gay marriage is all about the effort to expand gay influence and the gay comfort zone. Their chosen strategy is creeping incrementalism.
Gay activist litigators have gathered semi-annually since the mid 80s for meetings called the Roundtable, where they plan the strategies that now threaten to subvert traditional social institutions and relationships. This group took great encouragement from a Hawaii Supreme Court decision that commanded the state to show a “compelling” reason for excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage. “Once the Hawaii court ruled, we were in a different world,” recalled gay radical Evan Wolfson. Wolfson says the court decision gave gay litigators a “sense of empowerment.” Wolfson celebrated what he called a “seismic win” and declared that gays stood “on the verge of victory,” according to this New York Times article.
Their euphoria did not last. The Hawaii Supreme Court took three years to make a decision. During that time traditionalists opposed to homosexual wedlock prevailed upon President Clinton for assistance in passing the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which confines federal recognition to only those marriages between a man and a woman. Further, the act lifts from state governments the burden recognize gay unions made in other states. In Honolulu, the State Legislature placed a constitutional amendment on the November 1998 state ballot that would give the people’s elected representatives the sole power to define what a legitimate marriage was. Hawaii voters soundly approved this defense of traditional behavioral norms by a resounding vote of 69 to 29 percent. As the Times article noted, "Wolfson’s much-heralded victory had turned into sour defeat.”
The lesbian troika of Beth Robinson, Susan Murry and Times poster-gay Mary Bonauto, next set their litigious sites on the state of Vermont. The Vermont Supreme Court had issued rulings that were favorable to cohabiting homosexuals. Even more enticing, Vermont’s Constitution, unlike Hawaii’s, was difficult to amend, making it difficult to traditionalists to defend time-honored social institutions against radically novel interpretations of Vermont’s Constitution that might be handed down from on high by Vermont’s liberal utopian jurists. The Times called a decision allowing “second-parent” adoption by a homosexual lover a “pioneering opinion” by the Vermont Supreme Court.
Lesbian Lawyers Bonauto and Murry created a propaganda mill called the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force which, according to the Times, “conducted public education work of a sort that had never occurred in tandem with the Hawaii case.” They exploited a weakness in Vermont’s Constitution to argue that the exclusion of homosexuals from the benefits of marriage was unconstitutional. After a rejection of their argument by a trial judge, the Vermont Supreme Court endorsed their complaint. The court’s decision in Baker v. State called for a legislative remedy. This left the lesbians “crushed”, says the Times, because the lesbians had hoped that the high court would impose gay marriage upon the citizens of Vermont by judicial fiat. When the elected representatives of Vermont finally got around to the matter, the result was “civil unions” which gave homosexuals all the benefits they said they wanted, but denied them the legitimizing term “marriage”, which is what all the gay agitation had really been about. Gays were not content to be tolerated, they wanted the 98% of American society who was heterosexual to embrace every psychic and behavioral dimension of the homosexual personae. They wanted the world to swallow homosexuality whole hog. Sadly for them, normal people have a gag reflex.
Ever the opportunist, Mary Bonauto decided to try again in Massachusetts where the state Constitution and a very liberal Supreme Court offered another soft target. A gathering of that state’s gay radicals in the summer of 2000 endorsed Mary Bonauto’s plan of attack. In April of 2001 she filed Goodridge, a right-to-marry case, in Boston. The trial court rejected her arguments, so she appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. She argued that the Vermont approach was not truly satisfying because it denied homosexuals the rapture of calling their social arrangements marriages. Said the lesbian litigator: “...when it comes to marriage, there really is no such thing as separating the word ‘marriage’ from the protections it provides. The reason for that is that one of the most important protections of marriage is the word, because the word is what conveys the status that everyone understands as the ultimate expression of love and commitment.”
She captured the essence of the matter perfectly; her arguments were all about a quest for status: a tiny fractional subset of society, caught in the grips of an unusual same-sex attraction, whose sexual behavior is characterized by an essentially masturbatory and biologically pointless repertoire of bumps and grinds, and whose parental modeling has been shown to be detrimental to the healthy development of children is, suddenly, after millennia, demanding to have their fringe behaviors held in the same high regard as those of all the developmentally unaltered folks who have shouldered the burden of culture building since the dawn of humanity.
While waiting for a decision, the United States Supreme Court handed down the Lawrence v. Texas decision that invalidated all anti-sodomy laws in America and included Justice Anthony Kennedy’s warm and expansive language about homosexual relationships. The majority of the court felt that America should behave more like the sophisticated forward thinkers of Europe. Once again the Times article likened the Lawrence decision to the '54 Brown decision in an effort to steal an aura of nobility from black people and wrap it around a ragtag group of same-sex-fixated paraphiliacs.
Five months later, by a 4 to 3 decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court gave Mary Bonauto what she had been longing for. Said the Times article: “The moral influence of the Lawrence decision on the Massachusetts court was made explicit at the very beginning of the Goodridge majority opinion, in which Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall cited Lawrence three times in her first three paragraphs.” Said Matt Coles of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project: “Goodridge is the earthquake because of Lawrence.”
The complexity of Massachusetts law prevents traditionalists from offering voters the opportunity to ban homosexual wedlock and homosexual civil unions until the year 2008. As the joyful author of the New York Times article remarked: “Thus gay marriages will have been hometown realities in Massachusetts for at least two years, if not four, before ballots to overturn Goodridge can be cast.” So to hell with the democratic process and to hell with preserving a social order to which most Americans would pledge their allegiance. A scant 40 percent of Massachusetts voters have evinced any support for homosexual wedlock. The utopians on the high court have imposed an unwelcome social arrangement on a people who do not accept its legitimacy. The fact that it was imposed upon them without their consent makes it doubly bogus.
Because he understood that the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Law would be challenged by the well-financed forces of homosexual activism, President Bush proposed an amendment to the United States Constitution that would clearly define a legitimate marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Observed the Times article, “When the gay men and women of the Roundtable assembled on March 1 for a long-scheduled meeting, many worried that federal intervention could upset their careful state-level strategy.”
The Goodridge decision prompted a wave of official malfeasance as public servants in various communities began issuing marriage licenses to homosexual couples. San Francisco City Hall went so far as to conduct so-called marriages of homosexuals. Lamented the Times: “On March 11 the state Supreme Court ordered San Francisco officials to stop issuing licenses to same-sex couples, and joyous scenes at San Francisco City Hall came to an abrupt and tearful end after 4,037 same-sex marriages.” The California Supreme Court has since voided all of these marriage parodies, including that of the abrasive Rosie O’Donnell and her lesbian gal pal. Rumors that the happy couple had established a bridal registry with Snap On Tools remains unconfirmed.
Gay activists are hoping that the issue of gay marriage will reach the Oregon Supreme Court before voters have a chance to vote gay marriage into the dust bin of history. Lambda Legal is plotting constitutional challenges in New Jersey, New York and Washington. Gay challenges are also under way in Arizona, Florida, Indiana and North Carolina. In praise of Mary Bonauto the Times gushes that “insiders who fully appreciate how a very small network of gay lawyers has brought America to the threshold of another civil rights milestone know whom to credit.” In truth, Mary and her cadre of litigation-hardened lesbian sidekicks has burdened us with a millstone of judicial dictates. This summarizes the first of the four gay-advocacy articles in the New York Times.
Making Gays Look Good by Comparison
The second article in the same Sunday issue is also in the glossy magazine section of the Times. It’s called “Runaway Bride”, written by Carl Holm “as told by Liz Welch.” Mr. Holm’s purpose is to paint polygamists as a bad lot. He offers that his parents are Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, a faction that broke away from the Mormon Church when the faithful in Salt Lake City renounced polygamy in 1890. He tells us that he found his father’s efforts to isolate his family from “evil influences” too confining. “By the time I was 13, I had started drinking and taking drugs. I did it to impress my friends, but more to rebel against my father, who would inevitably find out and then beat me.” Mr. Holm makes no effort to explore the possibility that his father “inevitably” found out about his deplorable behavior because the younger Mr. Holms wanted his daddy to find out. Were these beatings the mindless sadism of a brute, or just his father’s rustic way of turning his son away from booze and narcotics? Mr. Holms is not reflective enough to even ask. He laments that “my dad had forbidden my siblings to hang out with me.” Really? Imagine that, a father who didn’t want his children to be influenced by a dope user. So Carl left his family. To this day he has almost no contact with them.
Aside from these facts, the remainder of the article is a righteous slam against that fraction of a splinter faction of old Mormonism that pressures young women into arranged marriages. It’s a good argument, but it’s presented to us as an indictment of polygamy. Forced marriage is not a necessary dimension of polygamy. Most polygamous arrangements are social contracts negotiated by free adults. So why this slam article now, in the prestigious magazine section of the New York Times?
Here’s the reason: No sooner had the ink dried on the Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas majority decision, the one that abolished all anti-sodomy laws in America, than Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, warned us that the manner in which the Court had repudiated Bowers v. Hardwick spelled the end of all morals legislation in America. If consensual sodomy was permissible, then why not polygamy also? It was just a quirk of history that a sodomy case had reached the Supreme Court before a polygamy case. If the court had chosen to abolish all anti-polygamy legislation first, then the question of the day would have been, “If consensual polygamy is permissible, then why not sodomy also?” Gays had no reasonable answer to offer. Worse yet, the comparison effectively lumped homosexuality in with other unsavory human behaviors. Gays wanted to isolate their particular predilections from all others; they sought a spanking-clean legitimacy, so gays urgently sought to widen the separation in the popular mind (public opinion) between homosexuality and polygamy. That’s the reason for the slam article in the New York Times. As much as the first article was about a “pioneering” lesbian lawyer and sought to make homosexuals seem warm, virtuous and normal, the second article works just as hard to smear polygamists as brutish anachronisms with intellects darkened by biblical fundamentalism. Got that? Homosexuals are smart and fashionable and so are the people who love them, while polygamists, and probably all persons of faith, are knuckle-dragging troglodytes whose minds are shuttered by religious dogma. It’s those homespun religious folks who are the real weirdoes. Next to them, homosexuals seem perfectly normal.
There’s No Such Thing as Normal
The third article in the Sunday issue has no title, but it is capped by an arresting illustration by Mirko Ilic. Illustrators must be booked well in advance, so it was the intention of the Times to draw special attention to this article. The graphic features five hairless human heads of varying bronze hues, with eyes darting suspiciously left and right. The crowns of the first four heads have mutated into blocky rectangular prisms; the crown of the fifth head is a four-sided pyramid rising to a high peak. A bold-faced caption beneath the illustration reads: “Normal is a rare condition. So rare, in fact, that it may not even exist.” The text by Amy Harmon is a sly attempt to subvert your confidence in the very existence of normality.
This Times article informs us that “in a new kind of disabilities movement, many of those who deviate from a shrinking subset of neurologically ‘normal’ want tolerance, not just of their diagnoses, but of their behavioral quirks. They say brain differences, like body differences, should be embraced and argue for an acceptance of ‘neurodiversity’.” Nowhere in this article does the author mention homosexuals as a subset of the “neurodiverse,” but that's the hidden subtext.
Punching her point, Amy tells us that “as psychiatrists and neurologists uncover an ever-wider variety of brain wiring, the norm many agree, may increasingly be deviance.” Got that? Deviance is the new norm.
“We want respect for our way of being,” declares Camille Clark, who has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism often marked by an intense interest in a single object. “Some of us will talk too long about washing machines or square numbers, but you don’t have to hate us for it.” Note the way in which anyone who is creeped out or irritated by another person’s obsessive behavior is characterized as a hater. What if their single object of intense interest was one of your children? Are you then an insensitive person, a hater perhaps, if you are not accepting of the latest insights in neurodiversity?
Ms. Clark assisted in the creation of a website where people list their professions and obsessions next to a photograph of themselves. Says the Times: “The idea is to show normal-looking people, whose peculiarities stem from brain wiring -- and who deserve compassion rather than exasperation.” The words “normal-looking” should put you on guard. The Times is asking for “compassion” for “normal-looking people whose peculiarities stem from brain wiring.” Perhaps brain re-wiring would be a better description. Accidental mutations or hormonal exposures place most homosexuals squarely among the “neurodiverse.” Says the Times, “Overcoming the human suspicion of oddity will be hard, the more so because the biological basis of many brain disorders can’t be easily verified. Usually, all anyone has to go on is behavior.” Exactly right, but our collective suspicion of oddity is rooted in our collective experience in encounters with odd people. Just how odd are they; are they capable of self control; are they obsessed; what excites them?
The Times insists that “a neurologically tolerant society would try to accommodate as well as understand behavior that remained aberrant.” This is a formula for the wholesale colonization of all social institutions by the neurodiverse, most prominent among them homosexuals. If we resist colonization, them we are intolerant of neurodiversity, which would be wrong, and even worse, unfashionable.
The moral heart of the article is this paragraph: “For patients, being given a name and a biological basis for their difficulties represents a shift from a ‘moral diagnosis’ that centers on shame, to a medical one, said Dr, Ratey, who is the author of “Shadow Syndromes,” which argues that virtually all people have brain differences they need to be aware of to help guide them through life.” Self-awareness is a good thing, but talk of a shift from a “moral diagnosis” to a medical one is moving dangerously close to eliminating free will as a dimension of human conduct. If we are all “different” and just a step away from an exculpatory diagnosis, if we are all patients-in-waiting, then we have all been given license to behave shamelessly. To put it another way: in a world where everyone has been redefined as a weirdo, homosexuals are just as “normal” as anyone else. An attack on the very idea of normalcy is a big boost for the gay social agenda.
Using Animals to Promote the Gay Agenda
The fourth and final article also appeared in the prestigious magazine section of the Times. The title is “Same-Sex Selection,” with the subtitle “The Stanford biology professor and author argues that homosexuality is a regular part of the animal world but most scientists are reluctant to admit it.” It’s a full-page Q&A with Professor Joan Roughgarden. The right-hand margin is occupied by a head-to-toe photograph of Professor Roughgarden “herself.” I use quotation marks because Joan Roughgarden is a simulacrum, a surgically contrived imitation of a woman, someone the previous Times article would have described as “normal-looking”, someone the Rainbow Coalition would call a transsexual. Professor Roughgarden wrote a book titled Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People.
Professor Roughgarden has chosen to be deeply impressed by what “she” believes to be homosexual behavior in animals: “There are 300 vertebrate species in which homosexual relationships are a regular part of the natural social system.” Left unsaid is the fact that 300 species is a tiny fraction of the almost 50,000 vertebrate species now alive. Confusing instinct-driven animal behavior with what humans understand to be a homosexual relationship is also a fool’s game. Does the professor have a deeply personal self-serving agenda? Why didn’t the former Jonathan Roughgarden mention that “she” was a transsexual to the readers of Evolution's Rainbow?
The prof laments that life in the laboratory “is a difficult environment for women and gays because of the sexually explicit humor.” There is a complaint that museum dioramas don’t show enough homosexual behavior among the stuffed animals. Sadly, the professor opined, “When you first come out as a transgendered person, you spend your first year in absolute euphoria. Then reality sets in, and you have to make a life and deal with the stigma.” You’d think the stigma of mouthing stupid thoughts would be enough for anyone.
Here’s the truth: nothing that animals do is a substantive reflection of human homosexual behavior. Every such false comparison is an attempt to legitimize human homosexuality with false assertions that homosexuality is commonplace in Nature, is “natural”, and therefore also “good.” The New York Times has a long history of pushing silly animal lifestyles articles on the public as a sly way of legitimizing human homosexuality. Let’s take a moment to look at a previous Times effort.
Paging Doctor Doolittle
Before homosexuality became the one topic that homosexuals couldn’t stop jabbering about, Oscar Wilde coyly referred to it as “the love that dare not speak its name.” On February 7, 2004, the New York Times, in an unacknowledged tip of the hat to Wilde, published Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name, an article subtitled “Homosexuality Among Animals Is Common.” It was yet another contribution to the gay marriage debate by a lifestyles newspaper that has come to resemble the Advocate in its breathless promotion of homosexuality.
In the opening paragraph we are told of two male chinstrap penguins that are held captive at the Central Park Zoo on Manhattan Island. “At one time, the two seemed so desperate to incubate an egg together that they put a rock in their nest and sat on it...” Finally their keeper gave them an egg and “Things went perfectly.” “They did a great job,” said the keeper. So what? In the fiercely hostile environment of Antarctica male penguins spend months standing guard over nests in the wind-blasted winter darkness of the far South. Male penguins are hard-wired to guard nests. So why the urgency to inject notions of homosexuality into a situation where two captive penguins are observed simply trying to tend a nest?
The Times has a political agenda: “Roy and Silo [the penguins] are hardly unusual.” “Indeed,” crowed the Times, “scientists have found homosexual behavior throughout the animal world.” And: “This growing body of science has been increasingly drawn into the charged debate about homosexuality in American society on subjects from gay marriage to sodomy laws, despite reluctance from experts in the field to extrapolate from animals to humans. Gay groups argue that if homosexual behavior occurs in animals, it is natural, and therefore the rights of homosexuals should be protected.” Then the New York Times asks rhetorically, “If homosexuality is not a choice, but a result of natural forces that cannot be controlled, can it be immoral.” This last sentence is their covert agenda in a nutshell. Note the unsubstantiated suggestions that human homosexuality might be “not a choice,” that human homosexual behaviors might be an expression of “natural forces that cannot be controlled”, and the suggestion that maybe the whole topic of human homosexuality should be shielded from the scrutiny of ethicists. The Times has presented us with a model of the homosexual as a helpless sex robot ruled by uncontrollable animal impulses, someone free to roam the Earth and do as he will without criticism. If you were to present such a model of the homosexual as your reason for keeping your child away from homosexuals, then you would be denounced as a heterosexist and a homophobe, but because the well-intentioned New York Times is offering this model in defense of homosexuals no one flings mud at them. Their concerns are holier than yours.
It’s an amazingly sly piece of writing, filled with unfounded assumptions and undefined expressions. What does the author mean by “natural forces”? Why is it assumed that “natural forces,” whatever they may be, “cannot be controlled”? There is no attempt to define non-human homosexuality; the author doesn’t want to be pinned down by a definition; it is much better for this crypto-polemicist if things are left vague and there is plenty of room for lots of unjustified anthropomorphizing.
First of all, nothing that animals do is immoral. Animals have no moral precepts because they have no cerebral cortex, no higher brain with which to impose reason, reflection and restraint on their more primitive limbic brain, sometimes also referred to as the “old” or “reptilian” brain. Animals are driven by instinct and they are inhibited by fear.
When gays start talking about “uncontrollable forces” the debate begins to sound like the one over pedophilia. In his essay in Reason, Thomas Szasz argues that pedophilia is ultimately still a moral failure regardless of its biological foundations: “Bibliophilia means the excessive love of books. It does not mean stealing books from libraries. Pedophilia means the excessive (sexual) love of children. It does not mean having sex with them.” In other words, our established culture defines the limits of the permissible; people transgress those limits because they choose to do so, not because of “uncontrollable natural forces.” A proclivity is not a mandate. The alcoholism of many people seems to be rooted in their biology, but we still insist that they not drive while drunk.
The Times waxes rhapsodic about the bonobos, “apes closely related to humans” who “nearly all are bisexual, and nearly half their sexual interactions are with the same sex. Female bonobos have been observed to engage in homosexual activity almost hourly.” So what are humans waiting for, the bonobos have shown us the way.
In 1999, Bruce Bagemihl authored Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, a study of same-sex behavior in animals. The author claimed that homosexual behavior had been documented in about 450 species. You have to dig to discover that “homosexual behavior” includes such behaviors as long-term bonding, courtship displays or the rearing of young. This book was cited in a “friend of the court” brief for the purpose of swaying the Supreme Court as it considered Lawrence v. Texas. The Court's decision in that case abolished all anti-sodomy statutes in America and invigorated the big push for homosexual wedlock. It was another triumph for junk science.
According to Janet Mann, a professor of biology and psychology at Georgetown University who has studied same-sex behavior in dolphin calves, so-called homosexual behavior in animals may not be about sex at all. She says that same-sex dolphin behavior is about bond formation. She says that dolphins form long-term alliances, sometimes in large groups. As adults they cooperate to attract a single female and then keep other males away from her. These dolphins may share the female or assist one male to mate with her. Professor Mann emphasizes that male cooperation is very important and that the same-sex behavior of the young calves “could be practicing” for heterosexual adulthood. So what the gay propagandists are calling animal homosexuality may, in reality, be male bonding, a band of brothers, a cooperative animal fraternity.
Paul L. Vasey, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, cautions us that “For some people, what animals do is a yardstick of what is and isn’t natural. They make a leap from saying if it's natural, it’s morally and ethically desirable.” To illustrate the error in this line of thinking, Professor Vasey points out that “Infanticide is widespread in the animal kingdom. To jump from that to say it is desirable makes no sense. We shouldn’t be using animals to craft moral and social policies for the kinds of human societies we want to live in.” But that is exactly what advocates for the wider social acceptance homosexual behaviors are doing. They are using poorly understood animal behavior to bolster flimsy arguments in favor of novel social arrangements among humans. In truth, the animals can’t teach us how to be anything other than animals. They are what they are. We are not what they are.
Animals respond to many internal and external promptings; they are not ruled by an iron hand of instinct. Having said that, it must be added that animals are not deep thinkers; their take on the world is largely sensory, a tossed salad of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Their response to these sensory messages may become confused and their behavior contradictory. Animals lack the ability to express their conflicted emotional states and so they may act out their emotional confusion with ambiguous behaviors. For example: an animal that feels the urge to express dominance, or aggressiveness or just plain togetherness, may borrow a gesture from its repertoire of instinct-driven reproductive behaviors to do so. Some pathetic gay naturalist may witness such behavior and leap at the chance to exploit the observation for political gain. We call these political points “junk science.”
Here’s another example: male cats are primed to stalk and kill small critters with high-pitched voices and quick jerky movements. On some occasions a tomcat that is playing with his own kittens may become so stimulated by their movements and noises that he lapses into hunter mode and kills one of his own offspring. Human witnesses have falsely named such behavior cannibalism, but the cat is not a cannibal, it is just a confused cat. Similarly, same-sex interactions among animals should not be interpreted as an analogue of human sexual behavior.
No animal has tweaked the imaginations of New York Times writers more than an isolated species of pygmy chimpanzee called the bonobo. For example, Times columnist Maureen Dowd uses bonobos as post hoc justification for her ideological views. Says Dowd, “Bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, live in the equatorial rain forests of Congo, and have an extraordinarily happy existence. And why? Because in bonobo society, the females are dominant.” Dowd quotes another Times writer, Natalie Angier, to the effect that bonobos “...are less obsessed with power and status than their chimpanzee cousins, and more consumed with Eros.” This is the worst sort of anthropomorphizing, but it passes muster at the
Says Jacque Lynn Schultz, the ASPCA Animal Sciences Director of Special Projects: “Usually, an un-neutered male dog will mount another male dog as a display of social dominance...” The lingering scent of a female in heat on a male dog may prompt other males to attempt mounting the attractively scented male dog. It is a fool’s game to call such behavior evidence of homosexuality among dogs. A male dog who catches the scent of an estrus female may mount the first thing he encounters, even a surprised human. It has been written that Roman animal handlers would smear the scent of wild animals on Christian women to encourage beasts to mount them for the amusement of pagan audiences in the Roman Coliseum. Should we interpret this behavior as evidence of bestiality among the beasts? Or do we see clearly that these animals were tricked into doing something they would not otherwise have done. Cross-species sexual behavior is not natural for animals and neither is what humans understand by the word homosexuality natural to animals.
The seemingly homosexual behavior of some animals is the misplaced acting out of a confused sexual automaton. In 1996, homosexual scientist Simon LeVay admitted that “it seems to be very uncommon that individual animals have a long-lasting predisposition to engage in such [homosexual] behavior to the exclusion of heterosexual activities. Thus a homosexual orientation, if one can speak of such a thing in animals, seems a rarity.”*
So the appearance of homosexual behavior in animals does not spring from a homosexual instinct, it is not a part of their basic nature, but the expression of a confused or frustrated animal. To quote Dr. Antonio Pardo, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Navarre, Spain: Properly speaking, homosexuality does not exist among animals... For reasons of survival, the reproductive instinct among animals is always directed towards an individual of the opposite sex. Therefore, an animal can never be homosexual as such. Nevertheless, the interaction of other instincts (particularly dominance) can result in behavior that appears to be homosexual. Such behavior cannot be equated with an animal homosexuality. All it means is that animal sexual behavior encompasses aspects beyond that of reproduction.”
In short, when observing animals there is always a risk of foolishly applying human psychodynamics to robotic animal behaviors. Human sexuality is different from animal sex. There is no dimension of physical or psychological pleasure to animal sex: scent and impulse is everything. Even Bruce Bagemihl, whose book Biological Exuberance was cited by the American Psychiatric Association in their amici curiae brief in Lawrence v. Texas, admits: “Any account of homosexuality and transgender animals is also necessarily an account of human interpretations of these phenomena... We are in the dark about the internal experience of the animal participants: as a result, the biases and limitations of the human observer -- in both the gathering and interpretation of data -- come to the forefront in this situation... With people we can often speak directly to individuals (or read written accounts)... With animals, in contrast, we can often directly observe their sexual (and allied) behaviors, but can only infer or interpret their meanings and motivations.”
So gays don't really have the goods to support their animal homosexuality argument. No sooner do they start talking about animal science than they wander off to the realm of pure speculation and begin spouting wishful nonsense. What animals do is not a yardstick for what is natural or good for humans. Humans are characterized by what differentiates them from the animals, even as we share certain sensitivities in common with them. Rationality and inhibition distinguish humans from the animals. To reduce humans to an animal simplicity is to devalue rationality and with it the notion of free will, which would be bad for society, but congenial for the gay social agenda. By confining the study of humans to the realm of zoology and staying clear of the realm of ethics gays feel they have a better chance of fooling us with bogus interpretations of animal behavior.
Parting Thoughts
In its July 25th, 2004 issue, the New York Times published a below-the-fold commentary by David Okrent who was acting “Public Editor,” a post the Times tells us serves as a “readers' representative.” This commentary bore the title, “Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” About halfway through, Mr. Okrent gets around to the way the Times has covered the issue of gay marriage. Here’s two paragraphs from that insightful commentary: “But for those who also believe the news pages cannot retain their credibility unless all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination, it’s disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading. So far this year, front-page headlines have told me that ‘For Children of Gays, Marriage Brings Joy’ (March 19); that the family of ‘Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home’ (Jan. 12) is a new archetype; and that ‘Gay Couples Seek Unions in God’s Eyes’ (Jan. 30). I’ve learned where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I’ve met gay couples picking out bridal dresses; I’ve been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom dancing, couples whose lives are the platonic model of suburban stability.
Every one of these articles was perfectly legitimate. Cumulatively, though, they would have made a very effective campaign for the gay marriage cause. You wouldn’t even need the articles: run the headlines over the invariably sunny pictures of invariably happy people that ran with most of these pieces, and you’d have the makings of a life insurance commercial.”
The articles he enumerates are but a handful of the enormous volume of Times gay-marriage advocacy articles, not to mention the dense cloud of supportive halo articles about animal homosexuality, neurodiversity, and the like. Merely gathering and burning all the Times editorials in favor of homosexual wedlock would warm your home for a winter. Mr. Okrent goes on to say that the Times’ implicit advocacy of gay marriage is underscored by all the informative articles that did not appear on the pages of the “newspaper of record.” He then rattles off a list of articles that appeared in other newspapers, such as the one about a scholar who made the case that gay marriage in the Netherlands has had a toxic effect on traditional marriage. Mr. Okrent concludes that “On a topic that has produced one of the defining debates of our time, Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires.”
These observations prompted an avalanche of mail from intellectually lazy Times readers who did not warm to his suggestion that the Times offer readers balanced coverage of the gay marriage issue. For example: reader Robert Glatzer of Spokane, Washington responded this way: “Your examination of where The Times fits -- left or right -- seems to accept the right’s contention that there should be equality between the two. But where the left looks for empirical evidence to support its views, the right already has the theological received wisdom that brooks no contradiction. Why give the right’s views the same weight as the left’s? Why present religiously based arguments as equally valid?”
Mr. Glatzer’s dismissal of all conservatives as rigid religious dogmatists is a common theme among liberals fearful of a vigorous debate. In essay after essay I have engaged the very best arguments of the gay-marriage advocates and never once have I felt the need to quote Scripture. I don’t care much about Scripture, but I do care about the people who care about Scripture; their collective decency is a powerful force for social cohesion. Since the Times is advocating a radical transformation of their moral environment, shouldn’t their voices be heard? Mr. Glatzer’s contention that the left engages in a vigorous search for “empirical evidence” is preposterous. The unquestioning one-sided advocacy of homosexual wedlock and homosexual adoption by the writers and editors of the New York Times is itself empirical evidence of their lack of curiosity and their deep emotional commitment to PC dogmas. To liberals, liberal codes of conduct are virtual Holy Writ: Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Gays, blacks, women, or anyone else on the PC protected-species list. Has Mr. Glatzer forgotten that the founders of the Secular Humanist movement boldly referred to it as a “new religion”? It’s time for all the “Mr. Glatzers” out there to climb down from their high horses of airy liberal superiority and join the messy slug-fest on the ground, already in progress.
Then there’s reader Zack Rubin who believes that “gay rights should be in the same category as creationism vs. science” and therefore off limits for serious debate. Zack shares his intellectual radiance with us: “Most people who are antigay or creationists base their views on the mindless repetition of tradition, ignorance and prejudice, rather than on careful consideration.
It is appropriate for a newspaper intended for a relatively educated audience to privilege science over creationism. Likewise, it is appropriate to privilege tolerance over bigotry, or democracy over totalitarianism.”
Well, how tolerant of Zack to try to narrow public debate. Zack does his best to sound open-minded and “relatively educated”, while simultaneously advocating the suffocation of any genuine debate by characterizing those who don’t share his progressive perspectives as uneducated, bigoted, incipient totalitarians. Why would guys like Zack want to trouble themselves to form actual reasoned arguments in defense of their radical proposals, when it is so much easier to simply convince themselves that they alone possess THE TRUTH.
Zack’s assertion that people who are skeptical of the gay social agenda “base their views on the mindless repetition of tradition, ignorance and prejudice, rather than careful consideration” is demonstrably untrue. People who believe that traditions are the distilled wisdom of millennia of social experience are reluctant to subject their hard-won and nurturing social institutions to radical experimentation. This is prudence, not prejudice. Their caution does not deserve to be called “mindless.” Also, the slowly gathering evidence of the consequences of homosexual wedlock, gay adoption, and gay divorce in those places where it has been allowed, suggests that caution is the wiser course. Smearing cautious people as “ignorant” suggests the petulance of an impatient youngster who just can’t understand why Mom and Dad won’t let him take that cool class in chainsaw juggling. Geez! Mom and Dad must be ignorant and prejudiced against chainsaw juggling; what other explanation could there be? Those who will not engage conservatives in debate are people in headlong flight from debate. The reasons they give for fleeing are just face-saving cosmetics.
And finally, there’s Mark Marabella of Norfolk, Virginia who believes that “Far more than so-called balance (which really means having no impact), The Times's greatest responsibility is to report the facts as its researchers and writers gather them and as its editors interpret them,” which sounds great until you realize that there is no meaningful intellectual diversity at the New York Times, so Mr. Marabella’s idea of the ideal newspaper is, in this case, just a formula for blinkered PC advocacy, what Mark calls “impact.”
In the opinion of Mr. Okrent, the Times has become a propaganda mill “because getting outside one’s own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning.” Indeed, it does. The New York Times is a curious product of that fashion-forward fever swamp called Manhattan Island, a place surrounded liberal assumptions a mile high. The Times is disproportionately influential because it is read by a small group of influential people who have grown comfortable with this newspaper’s curious take on things. The Times nourishes their collective bias with a steady diet of happy-face lifestyles pieces about ideal gay parents, junk science pieces about homosexuality in the wild, and carefully culled quotations garnered from selective call lists that always support the “progressive” ideological thrust of the latest Times advocacy piece masquerading as a “news” item about the gay social agenda. Their soft bigotry oozes to the surface as reader after reader dismisses anyone with a doubt as a “creationist,” a life form they place on a par with the crustaceans. Reader Mark Marabella goes on to characterize any attempt by the Times to give its readers more than a single perspective as “pandering” to its readers. “Why are its readers reading the paper in the first place,” he asks. “If they want ‘balanced’ reporting, they can tune into any TV news outlet.” Well, not any news outlet, Mark, but your point is well made. The Times has become a comfort bubble for a strain of utopians who have grown highly resistant to new information. They are well-educated in the manner of the Medieval Scholastics; Michael Moore is their chosen Aristotle; please don’t disturb them with scholarship that might challenge their assumptions. It has fallen to conservatives to play the role of a troublesome Copernicus, to rattle the shutters of their PC safe havens, to shine some light on the proposed clockwork utopia of the Left, and let the radicals know that normal people do not want to live or raise their children in such a hostile environment.
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Thomas Clough
First footnote: The anecdote about Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. was gleaned from a book titled The Trust by two former New York Times reporters, Alex S. Jones and Susan Tifft.
Copyright 2004
September 5, 2004
Second footnote: Quotation taken from Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality by Simon LeVay. (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1996).
Recommended reading: Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite, by Bernard Goldberg (Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-53191-X).
Bias, by Bernard Goldberg (Regnery, ISBN 0-89526-190-1).
Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGowan (Encounter Books, ISBN 1-893554-28-7).