This is a column by Joe Carter of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. It’s primary title is The Most Influential Essay You’ve Never Heard Of and it’s a great read on religious liberty (or lack thereof) and the LGBT agenda. You can follow Joe on Twitter here.
The Most Influential Essay You’ve Never Heard Of; How the LGBT Agenda Tops Religious Liberty
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
This frequently cited quote is often misattributed to John Maynard Keynes or Winston Churchill. But since no one knows the originator, I’ll claim it as my own. Sometimes when the facts change, I change my mind. Such is the case with this article.
This is not the article I set out to write. The facts – or at least my recollection of the facts – changed and I had to change with them. My original thesis was that several years ago LGBQT activists gave assurances that their agenda did not have to conflict with religious liberty rights and that they rejected any claims that opposing homosexual rights was akin to racial discrimination. I thought they too had once claimed, as law scholar Doug Kmiec said nine years ago, that it was “inconceivable” that “a successful analogy will be drawn in the public mind between irrational, and morally repugnant, racial discrimination and the rational, and at least morally debatable, differentiation of traditional and same-sex marriage.”
I had thought the claims that those who opposed homosexual behavior were “bigots” and “essentially arguing for homosexual Jim Crow laws” was a recent change in radical rhetoric. But I was wrong.
For several weeks I searched to find a single prominent LGBQT activist who supported religious conscience exemptions for individuals. I could not find a single one. The closest I could find was the view expressed by Chai Feldblum, an LGBT rights activist and current Commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 2006, Feldblum said:
Sexual liberty should win in most cases. There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that’s the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner.
While it is nearly impossible to find a LGBTQ activist who put religious liberty ahead of their agenda, it is possible (at least in theory) to find one or two who will denounce the “inconceivable” connection between homosexual activism and civil rights for African Americans. Though I was not able to find them, I assume they must exist. Yet even if they do, that view is definitely not widely shared amongst supporters of homosexual rights.
Instead, there is a concerted effort to vilify religious believers who oppose homosexual behavior. I used to believe such claims were the overheated rhetoric of misguided Christians. And even until recently, I would have disputed that vilification of religious opponents to homosexuality was a widespread phenomena within the community of LGBTQ rights activists and their supporters. But the indisputable fact is that I was wrong: Vilification has been a primary tactic of the homosexual rights movement for at least thirty years.
One of the most influential documents to support this tactic is an article written in 1987 for Guide Magazine. Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen wrote ‘The Overhauling of Straight America,’ which they later expanded it into a book, After the Ball – How America will conquer its fear and hatred of Gays in the 1990s, that was published by one of the America’s largest publishing houses (Doubleday) and became a national bestseller.
If you read Kirk and Madsen’s brief, eye-opening essay (and I highly recommend you do), you’ll immediately assume it’s a parody of the “gay rights agenda.” If a modern-day Jonathan Swift set out to satirize the most outrageous ideas about gay activism believed by religious believers, he couldn’t have produced anything like this. If it were satire, it would be deemed to outrageous, too demonizing, to be believable. Sadly, the essay wasn’t satire but an actual PR blueprint for efforts to gain acceptance of homosexual behavior over the past 30 years.
Read the remainder of this article here.
