VICE GOES MAINSTREAM

Vol. 18, No. 23
November 18, 2002
New American Magazine
Unmentionable Vice Goes Mainstream
by William Norman Grigg

Homosexuality's rapid rise from unmentionable vice to celebrated minority status is part of a campaign to subvert Judeo-Christian culture.

We [homosexual activists] have gone underground and we have people in every one of the Religious Right's organizations. We're on their mailing lists. We're reading everything they're putting out. We think the words from their mouths trickle down into violence. And when our evidence reaches a critical mass, we're going to use the best attorneys in this country to bring a class action suit in 50 states to have it stopped.

- Homosexual activist Mel White
Larry King Live, August 13, 1993

Is it possible that someday it may be a crime to oppose homosexuality? Could the Holy Bible eventually be designated "hate literature," and preachers be accused of "hate crimes" for condemning the practice from their pulpits? Will parents be forbidden to teach their children to abhor homosexuality? This all seems improbable, or even impossible - but as the case of Rolf Szabo illustrates, the homosexual movement now has the power to punish those unwilling to "celebrate" that lifestyle.

Prior to his firing in October, Rolf Szabo had worked for Eastman Kodak for 23 years. By all accounts Szabo, a resident of Greece, New York, was a capable and conscientious employee. But Szabo discovered that under the new workplace dogma of "diversity," job performance is less important than displaying correct attitudes.

In early October, according to Rochester ABC television affiliate WOKR, "Kodak's diversity group sent out an e-mail asking employees to 'be supportive' of colleagues who choose to come out on Gay and Lesbian Coming-Out Day." Replying to the message, Szabo tersely told Kodak's sensitivity commissars to stop sending him e-mails that he considered "disgusting and offensive." "I don't need this to do my job," Szabo explained. "It has nothing to do with gay [issues]. It could have been any other topic. It's just that enough is enough. We really don't need this to do our jobs."

According to Szabo, Kodak officials demanded that he sign a letter renouncing his "homophobic" attitudes. When he refused he was fired. "The Eastman Kodak Company gives me a paycheck; they don't own me," Szabo told WOKR. "I'll go somewhere else for a paycheck, that's all."

While extreme, Szabo's experience is not unique. "Diversity groups" like Kodak's are now a standard feature for many major corporations. Corporate workshops and seminars intended to encourage "sensitivity" regarding homosexuality are becoming commonplace, and those who climb the corporate ladder frequently find that advancement depends as much on their supposedly progressive attitudes as it does on their education, abilities, and performance.

"Gay-friendly" policies are in place in hundreds of major corporations. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the country's largest and most influential homosexual lobby, compiles a "Corporate Equality Index," rating 319 companies (including 208 in the Fortune 500) on their workplace policies toward homosexuals. Nearly 70 percent of the companies surveyed provide "domestic partner" benefits for homosexual "couples." And 293 of those companies "have nondiscrimination policies that include sexual orientation," reported the October 29th issue of The Advocate.

The Gay Financial Network (GFN) compiles a similar list called the GFN 50, "a comprehensive list of the most powerful and gay-friendly publicly traded companies." To qualify for that list, "Each company had to have a policy in place stating that it does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation," provides benefits to "same-sex domestic partners," and has suitable policies regarding "diversity training" and "a ban on any negative stereotypes based on sexual orientation...." Financial services giant American Express (which mandates employee "diversity training") sits atop the GFN 50, with such corporate heavyweights as Walt Disney Co., Microsoft, Xerox, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Citigroup also ranking in the top 10.

"I think the main issue lies in a corporate organization trying to force people to believe certain things with mandatory-type seminars and workshops," commented a Motorola employee in an August wire service interview. Speaking anonymously, the individual criticized the global electronics firm for imposing a series of mandatory "Homophobia in the Workplace" workshops. An employee at the Palo Alto headquarters of the Hewlett-Packard computer firm told THE NEW AMERICAN that the corporation similarly emphasizes "promoting inclusion." The individual cited a recent corporate newsletter that warned: "Any comments or conduct relating to a person's race, gender, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation, or ethnic background that fail to respect the dignity and feeling of the individual are unacceptable." (Emphasis added.)

"Diversity training is becoming mandatory catechism class for the church of the politically correct," notes Attorney Jordan Lorence of the Alliance Defense Fund. In post-modern America, it's not enough merely to tolerate homosexuality and similar perversions; these destructive vices must be embraced in the name of "celebrating diversity." As Rolf Szabo can testify, "non-discrimination" policies intended to make workplaces "gay-friendly" can lead to unemployment for non-conformists - a sobering consideration for professionals trying to find traction in tough economic times. Many Americans who espouse traditional moral views disapprove of homosexuality but prefer a "live and let live" approach. But Szabo's case offers just one of numerous illustrations that partisans of the homosexual revolution aren't willing to respect that proposed cease-fire in the culture war.

Trotsky famously remarked: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Similarly, it could be said that while you might not be interested in the Lavender Revolution, the Revolution is interested in you - and your children.

Targeting the Youth

Homosexual change agents in the corporate world insist that the battle against workplace "discrimination" must include indoctrinating straight employees regarding the evils of "homophobia." In government-run schools across the nation, even more aggressive efforts to indoctrinate schoolchildren are carried out in the name of preventing classroom "harassment" and combating youth suicide.

This strategy was pioneered in Massachusetts by the Boston-based Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educators Network (GLSEN). According to GLSEN's Kevin Jennings, homosexual activists "seized upon the opponent's calling card - safety - and explained how homophobia represents a threat to students' safety by creating a climate where violence, name-calling, health problems, and suicide are common." Jennings and subversives of his ilk insist that "gay" teens account for up to one-third of all teen suicides, often driven to self-destruction by feelings of rejection and loneliness. While it's true that serious behavioral disorders like homosexuality can breed suicidal tendencies, the oft-cited truism linking teen suicide to "homophobia" is entirely bogus.

In January 1989, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a four-volume report dealing with teen suicide. Attached to the report's findings was a brief polemical essay entitled "Gay Male and Lesbian Suicide," written by Paul Gibson, an obscure San Francisco social worker. Gibson blamed the traditional family and conventional religion for the problems experienced by suicidal homosexual youth. He described religion as a "risk factor in gay youth suicide because of the depiction of homosexuality as a sin and the reliance of families on the church for understanding homosexuality." Gibson's essay specifically targeted "traditional (e.g., Catholic) and fundamentalist (e.g., Evangelical) faiths [which] still portray homosexuality as morally wrong or evil."

The HHS included Gibson's essay despite a lack of documentary evidence to support its astonishing claims. This lent the federal government's prestige - such as it is - to the homosexual lobby's contention that traditional family life and orthodox religion are enemies of the public good, since they supposedly contribute to the risk of teen suicide.

This spurious linkage inspired a February 1993 report from the Massachusetts governor's office entitled Making Schools Safe for Gay and Lesbian Youth: Breaking the Silence in Schools and Families. It required that "all certified teachers and educators will receive training in issues relevant to the needs and problems faced by gay and lesbian youth. Such training should be a requirement for teacher certification and school accreditation." Two years later, GLSEN appeared on the scene with a program to "educate" parents and communities about homosexuality, using teen suicide as a wedge issue. "In Massachusetts, no one could speak up against our frame and say, 'Why, yes, I do think students should kill themselves'; this allowed us to set the terms for the debate," observes Jennings. This strategy "automatically threw our opponents onto the defensive and stole their best line of attack."

Consequently, many Massachusetts public school students are subjected to homosexual indoctrination, often involving shockingly explicit discussion of depraved sexual practices. And the objective is to begin indoctrinating children at the earliest possible age.

Having worked with the Massachusetts Governor's Advisory Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, Karen Harbeck insists "by seventh grade it's too late. People say this is an issue mainly for high school sex education class. They're wrong; it belongs in pre-school."

High school students in Kensington, Massachusetts, were assigned to read a textbook claiming that sexual activities may be "less threatening in the early teens with people of your own sex" and that "growing up means rejecting the values of your parents." Students in a middle school in Ashland, Massachusetts, were assigned "gay" parts in a role-playing exercise about "discrimination." Two boys were compelled to act the role of a homosexual "couple" seeking to adopt a child; one of them was forced to utter the line, "It's natural to be attracted to the same sex."

A March 25, 2000 homosexual "Teach Out" at Tufts University for educators and teenage students (staged with state government support) promoted pederasty (adult-child sexual relations), endorsed homosexual teenage sex, and explicitly described homosexual and sado-masochistic practices. One workshop, presented by three "gay" officials of the Massachusetts state government, was entitled "What They Didn't Tell You About Queer Sex & Sexuality In Health Class: A Workshop For Youth Only, Ages 14-21." With 20 young people present in the audience, the state employees graphically described sexual practices that cannot be mentioned by name in a family publication.

Another session entitled "Struggles & Triumphs of Including Homosexuality in a Middle School Curriculum" endorsed adult-child sexual relations. A videotape presented in that class featured a seventh-grade girl narrator claiming that the ancient Greeks "encouraged homosexuals; in fact, it was considered normal for an adolescent boy to have an older, wiser man as his lover." The workshop presenter, Christine L. Hoyle, then informed the assembled students and teachers that it was acceptable for an older man to approach adolescents for sex.

The Lavender Lobby promotes the worldview that it is proper for adult "lovers" to teach children about sex, and for children to tutor their backward parents about "tolerance." Mike Chiusano of Beverly, Massachusetts, unexpectedly found himself on the receiving end of such instruction in 1994 when his 13-year-old daughter denounced him as a "homophobe." "Our family was sitting around the dinner table, and quite without guile or any particular intention, my daughter . told my wife and me about mandatory assemblies she had attended, without request for my permission, as part of 'Homophobia Week' activities," recalls Chiusano.

Once again, Mr. Chiusano's experience is hardly unusual, since the supposed need to protect children from the influence of "homophobic" parents is a recurring theme for Lavender Revolution foot soldiers. "I think that the reality is that most of the parents themselves have tremendous prejudice and bigotry that have been passed on for generations," declared former New York State Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, who promoted classroom use of the sodomist tracts Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate. "The reality is that we as a society, if we are to remain free and just, must provide a counter-balance to what kids are obviously learning at home." A first-grade teacher from Wisconsin made a similar point in a homosexual propaganda video entitled It's Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School. Arguing for mandatorily indoctrinating grade school students, the teacher argued: "If parents are allowed to have their children opt out of gay and lesbian units [classes], what will happen when we teach about Dutch culture or African-American history? It scares me."

Permeating Popular Culture

Unless they are determined to withdraw from public life, Americans simply cannot avoid the subject of homosexuality and its offshoots. Lavender Revolution propaganda has literally saturated our nation's popular culture.

Scores of recent major films depict homosexuals as veritable saints, exploiting the mainstream appeal of unambiguously masculine leading men by casting them in homosexual roles. Dennis Quaid, who earned the gratitude and respect of mainstream audiences in early 2002 for his role in The Rookie, offers a useful example. The Rookie was an unabashedly pro-family, pro-Christian film based on the true story of a middle-aged schoolteacher and baseball coach who made it to the big leagues. In two other recent films - Frequency and a remake of The Parent Trap - Quaid convincingly played admirable characters devoted to family. However, this winter, on the heels of these crowd-pleasing offerings, Quaid stars in Far From Heaven, playing "a 1950s suburban husband tormented by his inability to control his homosexual longings," in the words of the homosexually themed Advocate magazine.

Similarly, the 1994 homosexual agitprop film Philadelphia cast Tom Hanks - an actor whose immense box office appeal was built around his everyman screen persona - as a mild-mannered homosexual dying from AIDS. Tom Selleck, who played macho Vietnam vet-turned-Private Investigator Thomas Magnum on television for eight seasons, played a homosexual reporter in the 1998 film In & Out, a role that called for him to kiss actor Kevin Kline on-screen. Since 1987, British Shakespearean Patrick Stewart has lent his resonant baritone and regal bearing to Star Trek's heroic Captain Jean-Luc Picard - with a brief detour as a flamboyantly "gay" interior designer in the 1995 AIDS "message film" Jeffrey. James Gandolfini took a brief sabbatical from playing a tough, womanizing mafia don on HBO's The Sopranos to play a macho homosexual hit man in the Julia Roberts/Brad Pitt romantic comedy The Mexican.

Why would such roles in often less-than-successful films attract such bankable stars? "Hollywood has a way of whipping people into line, of making them 'team players' and conform to a politically correct message," observes Dr. Ted Baehr of the Christian Film and Television Commission. Dr. Baehr told THE NEW AMERICAN that "there is great pressure brought to bear [in Hollywood] on some actors and creative people who are well-intentioned, church-going people who are made to believe that embracing 'diversity' regarding homosexuality is the key to winning the respect of the industry, and a way to make the world a better place. And the power brokers have ways of torturing people - through professional and personal ostracism, or other retaliation - to bring them to heel."

Even as it recruits bankable leading men to portray homosexuals on-screen, Hollywood has been packaging homosexual characters as ideal men. In the immensely popular My Best Friend's Wedding, Julia Roberts played a jilted woman who found consolation in a platonic relationship with a homosexual friend played by openly "gay" British actor Rupert Everett. That film introduced a propaganda theme that was taken up by the Emmy-winning television sitcom Will & Grace, built around a loving platonic relationship between a single woman and a homosexual man.

It is difficult to overstate the impact of the Lavender Revolution's conquest of prime-time television. The year 1995 marked a watershed in that campaign, according to the Orange County Register. That "was the year that Gay Came to Stay on prime-time TV," noted the newspaper. "Suddenly, gayness was cool. Although gay characters still weren't allowed to connect physically in prime time, homosexuality became a topic open for discussion on series old and new. And characters of all sexual persuasions pattered about it...." Seven years later, "you can scarcely find a TV show without a sympathetic lesbian or gay character," ecstatically observed lesbian activist E.J. Graff in the October 21st issue of American Prospect.

The viewing public has also embraced homosexual characters who are somewhat less than sympathetic. In 2000, tens of millions of American television viewers tuned in to learn the winner of the first installment of Survivor, a "lifeboat exercise"* disguised as a game show.

The contestant who claimed the $1,000,000 prize was Richard Hatch, an openly homosexual "corporate trainer" who prevailed over his rivals through psychological manipulation - an object lesson tragically ignored by the show's vast audience. According to several news accounts, the victorious Hatch received an avalanche of marriage proposals from both male and female viewers.

Psychological Warfare

Richard Hatch's Survivor triumph is uncannily representative of the Lavender Revolution's cultural advance, which is also the result of sophisticated psychological manipulation - so sophisticated that most Americans have little concept of the scope and rapidity with which the unmentionable vice has gone mainstream.

"Between 1987 and 1993 - the dates of two exhilarating and massive gay-rights marches on Washington - lesbian and gay issues were dragged out of the Ann Landers and home décor columns and onto the front and editorial pages, where they have remained," writes E.J. Graff in her American Prospect essay. "Perhaps the most important is the change in lesbians' and gay men's daily lives: Mentioning a same-sex partner in ordinary conversation - to co-workers, doctors, nurses, teachers, contractors, strangers on a plane - no longer feels death-defying...."

Although Graff makes no mention of a book entitled After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90s, (the Bible of the "Gay Revolution" - RJ) by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, her essay serves as a postcript to that "Gay Revolution" manifesto. Nearly a decade ago (see "The Lavender Revolution" in our January 24, 1994 issue), THE NEW AMERICAN described the campaign laid out in that book, designed to use the mass media to condition the public to accept and support the homosexual cultural revolution.

In their revolutionary blueprint, Kirk and Madsen outline a carefully calibrated campaign to "convert" society in a fashion congenial to homosexuality. "By conversion . we mean conversion of the average American's emotions, mind and will, through a planned psychological attack," they write. "We mean 'subverting' the mechanism of prejudice to our own ends - using the very process that made America hate us to turn their hatred into warm regard - whether they like it or not."

The first stage of the process outlined by Kirk and Madsen is to make the subject of homosexuality ubiquitous. "At least at the outset [of the campaign], we seek desensitization and nothing more," they write. "You can forget about trying right up front to persuade folks that homosexuality is a good thing. But if you can get them to think it is just another thing - meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders - then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won." One key objective was simply to make the previously unmentionable subject unavoidable: "The fastest way to convince straights that homosexuality is commonplace is to get a lot of people talking about the subject in a neutral or supportive way."

Once this is achieved, continue Kirk and Madsen, it would be necessary to "portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers.... Gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector." Graff aptly illustrates that tactic by describing the saturation coverage provided to the death of homosexual activist Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, dishonestly portrayed as an anti-homosexual "hate crime." (It was actually a brutal robbery-murder that had no demonstrated connection to Shepard's lifestyle.) Because of the media's focus on the Shepard murder and other supposed "hate crimes," explains Kevin Cathcart of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, "The definition of what shocks the conscience has changed" - meaning that it is now opposition to homosexuality, rather than the vice itself, that is supposedly considered shocking.

Shepard has practically become an icon. During the 2002 Miss America Pageant, Miss Nevada, Teresa Benitez, recited a letter written by Shepard's father and read by him in court to one of his son's murderers. And "conservative" Oregon Republican Senator Gordon H. Smith featured Shepard and his mother Judy in television ads during his reelection campaign. "My son Matthew was viciously murdered simply because he was gay," intones Mrs. Shepard. "Gordon Smith stands with me in the fight against hate. Matthew would have liked Gordon a lot."

That a "conservative" Republican would conscript the ghost of a homosexual activist as a character reference tellingly illustrates where we are as a society.

The Next Phase

Drawing on the Kirk/Madsen battle plan, once the public has been properly "desensitized," "conditioned," and "converted," attention must be turned on individuals and institutions that simply won't conform to the program. At this point, notes After the Ball, "it will be time to get tough. To be blunt, [traditionalists] must be vilified.... The public should be shown images of ranting homophobes whose secondary traits and beliefs disgust middle America. These images might include: the Ku Klux Klan demanding that gays be burned alive or [tortured]; bigoted southern ministers drooling with hysterical hatred to a degree that looks both comical and deranged...."

The hate-saturated caricatures thus described are difficult to avoid in movies, television, and in what is offered by that branch of the entertainment media that calls itself the "news." The product of this pervasive indoctrination is evident in Rolf Szabo's case, and in the way some schoolchildren feel obligated to denigrate their parents as homophobes.

And the revolution, according to Graff, has just begun. While much "progress" has been made, she contends, "it's not yet time for the forces of justice to abandon the field; the gay and lesbian cultural victory is still pretty limited." Homosexuals have yet to conquer such institutions as the military, the Boy Scouts, and marriage - but she's hopeful that homosexuals, "with enough help from our progressive friends," will ultimately prevail on those battlegrounds as well.

The "progressive friends" Graff alludes to are deployed as change agents throughout our society, conducting a long march through our institutions. Following a blueprint laid down by Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, these subversives are seeking to capture the culture, thereby eradicating all institutional impediments for creating the Total State. Writing in the Winter 1996 issue of the Marxist journal Dissent, Michael Walzer took stock of the Gramscian revolution's progress. Among the victories won by cultural Marxists in the "Gramscian war of position," is "the transformation of family life," particularly "the emergence of gay rights politics, and . the attention paid to it in the media."

The homosexual revolution seeks to destroy, through lethal redefinition, the central institution of a free society - the divinely ordained family. This is why the Gramscian change agents have made the Lavender Revolution a priority - and why that revolution's designs must be actively opposed.

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* Used in classroom settings as a form of psychological conditioning, "lifeboat exercises" typically place participants in a disaster scenario in which their survival depends on consigning others to death.