The Homosexual Agenda - The End Of Civilization
The idea that there is a “homosexual agenda” — a concrete plan, worked out with Machiavellian cunning and aimed at convincing straight Americans to accept the unacceptable — dates to the early 1980s, when the gay rights movement was for the first time ever beginning to gain a little bit of real political traction.
Perhaps the first important book to suggest a program of devious infiltration was Enrique Rueda’s 1982 tome, The Homosexual Network, which expanded more soberly on David Noebel’s The Homosexual Revolution: End Time Abomination, a crude 1977 book that savaged homosexuality. A tsunami of similar publications, increasingly pointing to a detailed and secret gay agenda, soon followed. Beverly LaHaye’s 1991 booklet, The Hidden Homosexual Agenda, was typical.
There is some argument on the religious right as to just how the “agenda” came to be. Some locate the beginning in early demands for gay rights like Carl Wittman’s 1970 article, “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto,” which called for making alliances with other progressive movements and appealing to younger people. Later, a large number of anti-gay activists claimed it started with a 1990 book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s, by psychologist Marshall Kirk and advertising expert Hunter Madsen.
That book proposed a straightforward campaign — tactics such as speaking openly about homosexuality, portraying gays as victims and their enemies as bullies, and seeking sympathetic allies — but it was painted as an evil conspiracy.
Amusingly, other anti-gay forces mistook a 1987 satire in a Boston gay newspaper for a real plan. Among its most famous lines: “We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lives.” It ended with this: “Tremble, hetero swine, when we appear before you without our masks.” It was even entered into the Congressional record — minus its first line, saying it was “a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage,” a parody.
Over the years, the religious anti-gay right has added ever more florid descriptions of the alleged homosexual agenda. Anti-gay groups have repeatedly claimed, falsely, that the gay rights movement seeks to abolish all sexual age-of-consent laws. Many asserted that the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder was merely appeasement of gay activists. Efforts to prevent bullying of LGBT students in lower schools were depicted as cynical attempts to “recruit” children into the “homosexual lifestyle”
The truth is that there is no “homosexual agenda” beyond the decades-long attempt by LGBT people to win equal rights — to be safe in their homes and on the streets, to be able to marry the people they love, to not be discriminated against in housing, jobs and so on. But there most certainly is an anti-gay agenda, and it is one that often will stop at almost nothing in its efforts to smear LGBT people.
The history of those who work to isolate and defame LGBT people, in particular with respect to the alleged “homosexual agenda,” is a long one. But it has gotten even worse as gay people have come closer and closer to real equality.
Janet Porter, president and founder of Faith2Action, said in an anti-gay documentary released earlier this year that “God and his commandments were kicked out of the classroom” and replaced with “a dark agenda that robs children of their innocence and puts their life at risk.” Appearing with her in the film, “Light Wins,” was Scott Lively, who claims that gay men orchestrated the Holocaust, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
John Stemberger, who heads Trail Life USA and opposed the Boy Scouts decision to allow gay Scouts, said that if the Scouts went further and allowed gay Scouting leaders, it would endanger “the safety and security” of the boys in the group and allow “the homosexual agenda to infiltrate the church.”
Also this year, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson told a viewer of his TV show, “The 700 Club,” that “the gays want to control everything” and warned that “[t]his is part of the left-wing agenda to do away with Christian values.”
Countless others have chimed in on a variety of mythological plans attributed to the gay agenda, all of them baseless — that hate crime laws will be used to send pastors to prison if they publicly disagree with homosexuality, that speech will soon be curtailed to disallow any negative comments about LGBT people, that the legalization of same-sex marriage will destroy heterosexual marriage and so on.
In the words of Janet Mefferd, a far-right syndicated radio host, the country may be moving “toward a day when every Christian who supports real marriage might be made to wear a yellow patch on the sleeve … to identify us as ‘anti-gay haters.’” She didn’t mention that the idea is ridiculous on its face and, in any case, would be entirely impossible under a constitutional system.