Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
Third in a series. Part 1, July 1999, and Part 2, October 1999.
November-December 1999 – “At a later stage of the media campaign for gay rights…it will be time to get tough with remaining opponents. To be blunt, they must be vilified…[W]e intend to make the anti-gays look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.”
Vilify nasty “antigay” opponents? That sentiment, as shocking as it may be to most Christians, is part of a strategy guide for the homosexual movement which appeared in a 1984 article for the homosexual magazine Christopher Street. Entitled “Waging Peace” and written by activists Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill, the work is Machiavellian in its proposals for “transforming the social values of straight America.”
Unbeknownst to many Americans, the battle in this country over hate crimes is being waged by homosexual activists in the context of the Kirk and Pill blueprint. Those who oppose any facet of the homosexual movement are being verbally savaged, with the issue of hate crimes being used as an instrument of bludgeoning.
Enforcing tolerance
Like any argument which lacks a self-evident basis from nature or God’s Word, the use of the hate crime debate to vilify opponents of the “gay” rights movement is based upon a rickety two-step equation.
The first presupposition in this construct is that any publicly-expressed view which presents homosexuality in a negative light is prima facie “hate speech.” The belief that homosexuality is unnatural, immoral and unhealthy is immediately condemned as hateful.
Following the savage murder of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard in October, 1998, the airwaves were filled with diatribes against those opposed to the homosexual movement. On the steps of the U.S. Capitol, for example, lesbian actress Ellen DeGeneres ranted against the “evil, idiotic” people whose views about homosexuality are nothing less than “hate.”
The Log Cabin Republicans, a homosexual rights group within the GOP, said this year it will back Republicans into the corner during the next election over the issue of intolerance toward homosexuals and lesbians. According to U.S. News & World Report, the group will demand that each GOP candidate sign a pledge indicating they will fight intolerance against homosexuals. “They are not going to get a pass on this,” said Log Cabin spokesman Kevin Ivers. “They are going to have to enforce tolerance or they are bigots.”
This single choice – support us or be labeled hate-filled bigots – is merely an attempt to intimidate opponents into silence. And to be sure, what crusader for an underdog cause like homosexual rights wouldn’t like to frame the discussion in such a manner?
AFA President Donald E. Wildmon said, “The homosexual movement rests on one lie stacked upon another, and their only hope for winning this battle of the culture war is to keep opponents from revealing the truth. Calling the earnestly held views of the opposition ‘hate’ and ‘bigotry’ is simply an attempt to end all reasonable public debate on the subject.”
Creating a hostile environment
Once opposition to the homosexual movement has been tarred and feathered as hate speech, the second supporting pillar for this shaky house of cards is that hate speech leads to “hate crimes.” Thus, every crime committed against homosexuals because of their sexual orientation is caused, directly or indirectly, by the hateful views of those who oppose the homosexual movement.
Immediately following the Wyoming murder, Tracey Conaty, communications director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), said, “When anti-gay rhetoric escalates, so does anti-gay violence. Hate crimes are a result of that intolerance.…The right wing is creating the most hostile atmosphere for [homosexuals] in recent memory. Hate violence is a logical extension of these rhetorical, legislative, and electoral attacks.”
In an article about hate crimes for U.S. News & World Report, columnist John Leo said the “political advantage” of using this line of reasoning “is that you can discredit principled opposition without bothering to engage it…. Seen through the lens of ‘bias’ (often no more than disagreement with the value system of the cultural left),” those in opposition to the homosexual movement, and those who kill homosexuals “start to merge in the minds of rational people.”
Linking Christians to hate crimes
While activists blame a homophobic society in general for hate crimes, Christians, in particular, are seen as the fountainhead of hate.
Matthew Shepard’s murder, for example, came after the controversial “Truth in Love” newspaper ad campaign during the summer of 1998. Initiated by Coral Ridge Ministries’ Center for Reclaiming America and sponsored by a number of Christian organizations, the newspaper ads were a message of hope for homosexuals who wanted to leave the lifestyle.
Activists, however, saw the ads differently. “These campaigns to change gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are so clearly not about compassion. They foster fear, misunderstanding, and intolerance. They foster an atmosphere of hostility that can lead to hate attacks such as the one against Matthew Shepard,” said Kerry Lobel, executive director of NGLTF.
In an official letter, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors officially denounced pro-family groups who had been involved in the Reclaiming America ad campaign.
“What happened to Matthew Shepard is in part due to the message being espoused by your groups that gays and lesbians are not worthy of the most basic equal rights and treatment,” the letter said. “It is not an exaggeration to say that there is a direct correlation between these acts of discrimination, such as when gays and lesbians are called sinful and when major religious organizations say they can change if they tried, and the horrible crimes committed against gays and lesbians.”
The ads, however, did not run in Wyoming newspapers. As conservative columnist Mona Charen pointed out, no one “has produced one iota of evidence that those two creeps [who killed Matthew Shepard] ever saw or read the advertisements in question. Further, even if they had seen them, it would be hard to imagine how something as innocuous as suggesting that counseling may help homosexuals become straight could even in the most twisted mind translate into ‘Go kill gays.’”
When your strategy is simply to vilify nasty “antigay” opponents, however, such lapses in logic rarely matter.
“It must end now”
If Christians say publicly that homosexuality is an aberrant lifestyle and a sin, and if that is a form of hate speech that, in turn, causes hate crimes against homosexuals, what is the solution?
Part of the remedy, activists insist, is for legislatures on the federal and state level to pass hate crime legislation. By punishing the perpetrators of violence against homosexuals, such crime will decrease over time.
Conservatives, however, have discerned a much more disturbing sentiment behind the call for hate crime laws: the only real solution is an end to “hate speech” itself. After all, it only requires a short step from the belief that, since certain words (“homosexuality is wrong”) lead to illegal acts (assaulting homosexuals), those words themselves should be illegal.
On a very basic level, hate crime laws already target speech. Wildmon said, “In a robbery, the only criminal difference between saying, ‘Give me your wallet,’ and ‘Give me your wallet, you queer,’ are two words. Words are what would add the additional penalties required by hate crime legislation. And that, to me, is a clear indication that hate crime laws are about hate speech, not crime.”
Homosexual activists, however, want to go beyond criminalizing the words used during the commission of a crime to banning what they consider hateful words altogether.
Author Gore Vidal said in The Advocate, a homosexual magazine, that those who believe – and even worse, publicly proclaim – that homosexuality is immoral or a sin “should be charged with incitement to violence and to murder, specifically in the case of Matthew Shepard.”
Once again, Christians appear to be a special target in homosexual literature. In an article for The Advocate examining the root causes of hatred toward homosexuals, Brendan Lemon wrote, “Hatred is also, unfortunately, grounded in Judeo-Christian religious teaching. Virtually all the messages that gay-positive educators strive to undo with children and adult offenders emanate from religious institutions.”
Lemon, who admits to being one of many “crusaders against homophobia,” pulled no punches about what needs to happen for the homosexual movement to achieve its goals, referring to “the JudeoChristian institutions that need to die if we are to advance.”
That homosexual activists ultimately intend to silence their opponents – using hate crime legislation as one instrument in the process of ideological subjugation – has been made clearer since the Shepard murder.
Following the publication of the Reclaiming America ads, Joan Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said, “The rhetoric of ‘hope and healing’ being used by religious political extremists, and their conviction that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people need to be ‘changed,’ fosters a climate of intolerance which puts people in harm’s way. It must end now.”
How is it that the convictions of religious people “must end now”? Those who sympathize with the homosexual agenda first insist that people who hold such views should keep their mouths shut. For example, a statement issued by the American Jewish Congress after the Shepard murder said, “It is not enough for public figures to refrain from active participation in such atrocities; they must also refrain from provocative words which can be used to provide a cover of respectability for flagrant bigotry.”
However, perhaps because of the confidence resulting in an almost decadelong string of victories for their agenda, homosexual activists seem all too willing to provide the ultimate solution to “hate speech.”
Ronni Sanlo, a homosexual activist at UCLA and a self-proclaimed “strong believer” in free speech, said, “Opinions are protected under the First Amendment, but when negative opinions come out of a person’s fist, mouth, or pen to intentionally hurt others, that’s when their opinions should no longer be protected.” (Emphasis added.)
The opinions of those who oppose the homosexual agenda should no longer be protected under the First Amendment? That such a thing could even be suggested in a free republic shows just how far homosexual activists in 1999 have come toward fulfilling the goals laid out by activists in 1984. 
