By Ray Kerrison, Reprinted from Human Events, 12/15/95

February 1996 – NYNEX, the $13 billion-a-year telephone and communications giant, is laying off thousands of employees to boost its bottomline profits.

At the same time, it has decided to spend an unspecified portion of its revenues to provide homosexual and lesbian employees and their parents with the benefits and privileges of married employees.

The company’s priorities are revealing. Less money for workers but plenty of funds to subsidize aberrant relationships.

The NYNEX policy is the latest misguided thrust in the cultural war that is afflicting modern American life and threatening to overwhelm it.

The movement to legitimize homosexual partnerships, begun by gay activists, has been picked up by some politicians who will do anything to snare a vote.

Some state governments have signed on, courts have jumped aboard, the media is in now, and now corporations like NYNEX are pitching in.

It’s only the beginning. Gay-partnership benefits and adoption privileges are preliminary skirmishes leading to the main event:  the legalization of homosexual “marriage.”

That may not be far off, as the courts and legislators in Hawaii are already jousting over it. If it is enacted, it will signal the impending collapse of American society.

Marriage between man and woman is the sheer anchor of civilization; it is the institution, divinely ordained, to procreate and protect children and ensure the survival of the human race.

There is no substitute, no equal. A nation that elevates any other human union, heterosexual or homosexual, to the same plane as lawful marriage and endows it with the same legal and moral approbation has lost its compass.

There is no future for a country that cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Not even Sodom and Gomorrah did what our governments, courts and corporations are now doing in the social arena.

That anyone at NYNEX would consider two gay men or two lesbians, shacked up in a Greenwich Village loft, the family equivalent of a husband, wife and children is distressing.

That the whole corporation – CEO, management and directors – would endorse it and fund it is downright perverse. They’ve lost the connection.

Homosexuality is an extremely complex subject, often hauntingly painful for those in search of sexual identity. It is often the target of ridicule, discrimination, violence. No one may sit in smug judgment of another.

But there’s no escaping that from the dawn of time, homosexuality has been deemed contrary to God’s law and, therefore, morally wrong. Old and New Testaments alike condemn it repeatedly and unambiguously.

But what did the prophets and sages of old know? In 1995, politicians, judges, TV anchors and corporate chieftains claim to be the source of all wisdom—which probably explains why the country is spinning into cultural decay.

The perils are becoming evident to some. Senator Robert Dole attacked the Hollywood establishment for its sleaze. Bill Bennett put the ax to TV talk trash with all its corruptive exploitation. Gen. Colin Powell’s parting presidential shot was a wistful wish to “restore a sense of shame in society.”

We are struggling through an age of cultural chaos in which the old guiding lights have been junked, institutional authority dismissed, and respect for law, life and civility devalued.

The harvest is rampant illegitimacy, drugs, violence, crime, perversion, pornography and human alienation.

The first and best hope to reverse the tide is the family unit. It should be encouraged, protected and defended with every resource available to religion, politics, the law – and corporation.

Conferring marriage’s special rights and entitlements on homosexual partnerships is a dagger thrust at the institution of marriage. It implies that they are equal, that homosexual practices are acceptable alternatives to conjugal love.

So NYNEX – like Disney, Time Warner, Microsoft and Sprint before it – is contributing to the dismantling of the values and standards that have served this country so well for more than 200 years.

NYNEX has dialed the wrong number here. Board-room decisions have consequences, and a corporation that discards the enduring wisdom of all history places itself at risk.

Time to hang up on them.