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Blogfest 2005 - May 2, 2008 - Printable Version
- “We come for your children” – The Truth About the Gay Agenda
by Mark Faulk
This article is from the April 4th edition of NONzine, I have a new NONzine article out today called "For Want of a Magic Wand, the Kingdom was Lost", which I'll post here and on www.myspace.com/faulkingtruth in a couple of days. “Together we burned the village, raped the horses, rode off on the women, plundered, and uh…pruned the hedges of many small villages!”
~ Chevy Chase as Dusty Bottoms in “The Three Amigos”
After three weeks of intense international media coverage, the furor over Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern’s homophobic tirade still hasn’t subsided. If anything, her repeated refusal to back down from her contention that homosexuality is the “biggest threat our nation has, even more than terrorism and Islam,” that they are “going after children as young as two years old,” and that “the homosexual agenda is destroying this nation” has only added fuel to the already raging fire.
If there is a positive side to the ignorance displayed by Rep. Kern, it is that the spotlight shined on bigotry has sparked a healthy debate on both sides of the issue. Discussions have ranged from the obvious latent homophobic attitude that still exists in this and other countries to the existence of the so-called “homosexual agenda” that Kern and other religious extremists have been referencing for years. They insist that this secret homosexual agenda is very real, and according to Focus on the Family Director James Dobson, includes such nefarious goals as “overturning laws prohibiting pedophilia and indoctrinating children and future generations through public education.”
So where did this purported gay agenda that threatens to rip asunder the very fabric of our nation originate, and if it’s as widespread as they claim, why don’t more gays know about it? As Oklahoma City teacher Kelly Forbes put it, “We have a gay agenda? I must have missed that meeting.”
The term itself, not surprisingly, was actually originally coined not by gay activists’ organizations, but by another James Dobson founded “family values” group called the Family Research Council (FRC). Founded in 1981, it was designed as a lobbyist organization to advocate Christian ideals on Capitol Hill…in other words, to promote the Christian agenda. Their leadership included prominent figures from the Reagan administration, and soon became the most powerful Christian political organization in the country.
The FRC produced a anti-homosexual propaganda video in 1992, entitled The Gay Agenda. The first video included “expert testimony” from psychologist and sex researcher Paul Cameron, who has made a career of twisting psychological studies to support the condemnation of homosexuality and connect it to child molestation. In fact, in 1983, the American Psychological Association expelled Cameron for failing to cooperate with an ethics investigation amid allegations that he misrepresented major psychological studies in his writings. In 1986, the American Sociological Association passed a resolution condemning Cameron for "consistent misrepresentation of sociological research,” and in 1996, the Canadian Psychological Association disassociated their organization from Cameron, stating that he "consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism."
In 1993, the FRC followed up The Gay Agenda with two other videos: The Gay Agenda in Public Education (1993) and The Gay Agenda: March on Washington (1993). All three videos and an associated feature film entitled Stonewall: 25 Years of Deception contained interviews with a slew of antigay “experts” such as Cameron, and have been widely used by churches and far right organizations as evidence that a gay agenda not only exists, but is bent on undermining the very values on which America was founded.
Other organizations, including the Alliance Defense Fund, have tied the gay agenda to a 1989 book entitled After the Ball, written by Michael Kirk and Hunter Madsen. Although After the Ball was published by one of the largest publishers in the world, the Alliance Defense Fund claimed that it was a “private publication” only distributed to homosexual activists. The Christian Broadcasting Network compared the techniques laid out in After the Ball to the brainwashing methods used by Mao Tse-Tung in Communist China. In reality, Kirk and Madsen advocated the use of mainstream public relations to promote the rights of homosexuals and lesbians.
In February of 1987, an article written by Michael Swift for the Gay Community News, and later entered into the Congressional Record, provided additional fodder for far right Christian groups and the growing number of radio talk show hosts who had begun to spread their propaganda to an even wider audience. Entitled Gay Revolutionary, the article did indeed espouse a much more radical approach to gay activism. The article began with “We shall sodomize your sons,” and continued:
“We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your army bunkhouses, in your truck stops, in your all male clubs, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding.”
Swift went on to advocate stealing husbands from their wives, killing those who use antigay slang, assembling vast homosexual armies to conquer the world, closing churches that speak out against homosexuality, and exposing the world’s leaders and great thinkers as homosexuals. He ended his article by saying “Tremble, hetero swine, when we appear before you without our masks.”
There was only problem with referencing Swift’s article as evidence of a radical gay agenda…it was written entirely as satire. When it was reprinted in the Congressional Record, the introduction line was omitted, which said:
“This essay is an outré, madness, a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage, on how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor.”
It didn’t matter. For the religious right, Swift’s satirical article has become the fictitious battle cry for a scourge that threatens to destroy America. Never mind that there is a blatant conservative Christian agenda that constantly lobbies our government at all levels to undermine the very liberties guaranteed by our Constitution. Or that private Christian schools now educate over 10% of the nation’s students. Judging from the support that Rep. Kern has received from the Oklahoma Republican caucus and others mimicking her extreme views, it is not an agenda that will soon diminish.
According to some of her former students at Northwest Classen High School, Kern has been promoting her own religious agenda for years, even in the classroom. One former student in both her Economics and History classes said:
“We were always trying to tell everybody she had issues. She was constantly ignoring the separation of church and state law (which I'm Catholic so I have nothing against religion) by making crosswords with the words God, cross, and Jesus in them. She would also continuously press her political views on us and get irate if we would disagree.”
The truth is, there is a gay agenda, just as every special interest group has their own agenda. It’s just not the deviant/pedophilic “I want to turn all your kids into queers and steal your husbands” propaganda that the religious right has been feeding their followers for decades. In reality, the gay agenda is not unlike the agendas of the civil rights or women’s suffrage movements before it. It is an agenda based on acceptance and equal rights under the law and in the eyes of the general public. And unlike the extremist Christian agenda, it doesn’t seek to overthrow governments or indoctrinate everyone to a homosexual or lesbian way of life. We can only hope that moderate Christians, and in fact all reasonable citizens, will continue to speak out against the intolerance that is being propagated by those who seek to force their own narrow minded views on all Americans.
And that, as always, is the Faulking Truth.
(Mark Faulk is the editor of www.faulkingtruth.com and is the author of The Naked Truth: Investing in the Stock Play of a Lifetime, scheduled to be released any day now and available at www.toginet.com Join Mark and Paul Faulk every Saturday from 1-2 PM CST on The Faulking Truth X2 Show at www.toginet.com)
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