The "Big Lie" Gay Lobby

By Rabbi David Eidensohn

            I thank Bob Knight for pointing out to me the terrible trash from hatecrime.org that purports to show that those who oppose gays are like Nazis. I used to be amused when someone called me a Nazi because I opposed the Gay Lobby. However, I then realized that the Big Lie built Stalin, Hitler, and other fanatics the machinery to destroy the opposition. The lengthy article at hatecrime.org deserves a response, which will be forthcoming. First, however, I must explain why I fight the Gay Lobby. Is it because I am a hater? For decades, I have worked with very sick people and perpetrators of heinous acts. One split his wife's head open and her brains fell out. When I put him in jail, he decided I would be next. He is dead, but others I worked with are alive and well, and cured of their problems. If you love people who have problems, you can help them. Haters cannot help anything. I never got paid for the time I spent when the therapists told me, "He is all yours, rabbi." The work is its own reward. Of course, I believe that heaven will reward me in Paradise for helping broken people. As a Cabalist, I see in their pain the deepest dimensions. I stand in awe of them when they persevere and see G-d where I don't.

            Why do I, an Orthodox rabbi, spend so much time and energy fighting the Gay Lobby? How did I get into this in the first place? My father, may he rest in peace, was a brilliant scientist, and in our home, a very religious one, we hate lies. People who were not afraid of being called names molded my youth and formative years. When we see some falsehood charging down the street, we like to step up and challenge it before it drags us out of our homes into the ravine and shoots us. Hitler and Stalin came to power because nobody would fight them. People who fear a fanatic are doomed. That is the general picture. Why did I select the Gay Lobby?

            About ten years ago, I was involved with family issues. When I heard that the Rockland County Legislature was holding a program about the problems of women, I went together with a good friend. We came to the Legislature, signed up to make remarks, and sat back for the program to begin. It began with a group of gays who hijacked the meeting to talk about their freedom to infect people with AIDS and HIV without the health department interfering. I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing. People like me had taken off time from their affairs to come to a meeting, and a group of gays just walk in and take it over. Nobody protested. Gay after gay got up and said the same thing, in ominous tones. The way they spoke, I realized that most people would not want to challenge them. Nobody did.

            My name was called and I stepped up to the microphone. I said, "If you are asking government to respect gay rights, you must respect the rights of people not to be infected. You must not demand the right to infect people with HIV and AIDS, and thus kill them." I concluded, "If refusing gays the right to infect and kill is bigotry, I am a bigot."

            I sat down and awaited the conclusion of the meeting. Not a word about women was spoken. Nobody asked the gays not to hijack the meeting. The liberal chair was very pleased with gays. I looked for my friend to take me home in his car, but he was not in the room. I found him in the parking lot. He was very concerned about me. "Did you see the way they looked at you? I ran out of the room," he said. My friend is probably the strongest person in our town. We stood in the parking lot and an activist passed me. He stared at me with eyes of cold and fixed hate. The eyes said, "I hate you. I won't listen to anything you have to say. You must do what I want." I said to him, "Why are you looking at me that way?" He was like a piece of machinery, without emotion. The robot said to me, "My friend is on the quilt." I asked him to explain. He said that the gays were making a quilt with a piece for every victim of HIV and AIDS, and his lover was on it. He therefore hated me, who opposed the rights of gays.

            I asked him, "If you do what I want, you won't infect other people and they won't die. If you do what you want, you will kill people and more gays will die." I thought it was a telling point, but the face did not budge. The same cold hate was pouring out at the exact tempo. There was nothing to discuss. On the way home, my friend said, "You have to be crazy to start up with them." I agreed. We both know what that meant.

            Weeks later I received the Legislature's record of the meeting. It quoted me as saying that I admitted that I was a bigot! I never admitted anything. I said, "If opposing the right of a gay to kill someone with AIDS is bigotry, I am a bigot." Does this mean that I confessed to be a bigot? Was I steamed! I was not angry at the gays. They live in their world and are honest about what they wanted. I accept such people. If I have to eat, what can I tell you? The scale and my doctor will have to wait. If I am angry, ditto. If you are honest, I can deal with you. I hate liars, especially when they make up lies about what I said in public. With a Catholic priest, Father Francis McCloskey of the Albany Diocese and some Protestant activists, I founded Sinai Conference. We made a cable television program called Sinai Scene. At our dinner, someone asked me to run for County Executive. I did, and learned about media. After a stint working the local newspapers, I decided to work on Internet, and still do. Bob Knight, who tipped me off about the hatecrime.org article calling me a Nazi, spoke at that dinner. I have worked with religious right people for many years, and don't remember bigotry and hate. Like me, these people know what is going to happen when masked robot faces take over the world. Our past century is all about those movements.

            Actually, the right is comprised of people who are not friends in the religious world. Catholics, Protestants and Jews have a very contentious and bloody history, and Jews have suffered terribly from all major Western religions. Nonetheless, radical secularism is a greater threat than religious people. I fight the Gay Lobby to save my family and community, not because I agree with everything my partners believe in their churches, and they feel the same way about me. The Twentieth Century saw millions of people exterminated not because of religious beliefs but because Stalin and Hitler invoked scientific secularism. The Gay Lobby is the next threat, and its tactic, like Stalin and Hitler, is to make people hate the opposition. This is done by Big Lies.

            Now for the lies on www.hatecrime.org.  It begins with a quote from Senator Paul Wellstone: "When you [anti-gay lobby people] say…you [gay Americans] are not a group of people who need special protection. You do well economically. You are an elite. That is precisely the argument that has been made in behalf of the worst kind of discrimination against Jewish people." (Senate July 29, 1994)

            Do gays need special privileges, or are they doing fine without them? A family activist came to the Senate and said that the process of helping blacks and women with civil rights does not apply to gays, because whereas other minorities cannot earn without help, the gays can. Does this sound Nazi? It sounds perfectly logical. Hatecrime.org mentions that Senator Wellstone is Jewish. I don't know if he is or not, I simply don't have any knowledge of the subject. I do know something else, however. A friend of mine is a television producer. He told me that a prominent writer presented a program to an agent, and the agent said, "We don't want any Holocaust material." Why is this? My friend explained: "The Jews have made such a hash of the Holocaust that people are sick of it." A statement like that from Senator Paul Wellstone who may be a Jew is why people are sick and tired of the Holocaust. The editor of our county Gannet newspaper told me that a woman called him up to cancel her subscription because she read about someone described as a Holocaust survivor. She said, "I am sick and tired of the Holocaust." This is very frightening. We cannot forget the Holocaust. We cannot ignore the need for understanding and appropriate civil rights. One way to destroy civil rights is to apply it to gays, who will take advantage and use their rights to infect and kill, which is exactly what they do. A daughter of Martin Luther King once said that Gay Rights would destroy Civil Rights. She is right. Twisting Civil Rights into the freedom to infect and kill, into the right to teach children about homosexuality, is damaging the civil rights of people who do need help.

            Hatecrime.org then proceeds to compare quotes from religious right people to the teachings of a Nazi propaganda film. Robert Knight said, "Homosexuals display political control far beyond their numbers. A tiny fraction of the population (about 1 percent), homosexuals have one of the largest and fastest growing Political Action Committees…" All of this is completely true, and is not in the slightest insulting. People who work hard to become politically effective are not ashamed. Why is this a Nazi statement? This mild and true remark is compared to the Nazi statement, "Although only one per cent of the world's population, with the help of their capital, they terrorize the world stock exchanges, world opinion and world politics." Did Bob Knight say a lie that the Gay Lobby terrorizes the world stock exchanges, world opinion and world politics? Remember, the Nazi statement is a Big Lie, and Bob's statement is completely true. The Nazi statement is designed to foment hate and fear, and Bob's statement is a compliment to a politically aggressive lobby. Are the Gay Lobby activists upset because someone said they are doing a good or great job?

            On page 3, we come to "Nazi" statements that homosexuals have more Sexually Transmitted Diseases than other people.  Can anyone deny this? The most recent Federal Center for Disease Control statistics in its 9/27/02 update quotes the Washington Post (09.27.02)::Christine Haughney that "syphilis cases have increased dramatically among gay men in New York City, CDC officials reported." The increase for one year was "more than double." "New York City Department of Health statistics…show that…of these [syphilis] cases 81 percent involved men with male partners." Does this compare with the Nazi Big Lie that Jews are the disease "rats" of the human race? Do Jews have more syphilis than other people? Do they spread infectious diseases among other people more than other humans? The Nazi statement is utterly remote from the plain truths mentioned by the family lobby. Incidentally, when the Gay Lobby wants more millions from the government, it complains that gays suffer from diseases that others do not. When family people say the same thing, they are "Nazis."

            The family lobby quoted facts to show gays are 1/3 of child molesters, one third of those who have sex acts with children, and commit 80% of pedophile attacks on boys. These are facts, not lies. The website equates this with the Nazi lie that Jews account for 98 percent of prostitution in the world.

            The subjective feeling that homosexuality is abnormal, supported by a century of therapists from Freud to very recent scholarship, is compared to the Nazi statement, "The Jew is interested instinctively in all that is abnormal and depraved." There are many homosexuals, and I have spoken to some of them, who would do anything not to be homosexual. As one prominent lesbian who is raising children said, "I hope my children are not gay." Conversion therapy can sometimes help, but it has a way to go. Those who can do it can change, but for those who cannot undertake the program, or who are unsuccessful with it, forces they wish they did not have drive their lives. Some homosexuals, of course, have made peace with their problem, and consider it something to be proud of. Not everyone who disagrees is a Nazi.

            The subjective feeling again supported by a century of therapists who considered homosexuality a disease, that homosexuality is unnatural, is compared to the Nazi lie, "What he [a Jew] calls ['art]' must titillate his degenerate nerves. A smell of foulness and disease must pervade it. It must be unnatural, grotesque, perverted or pathological."

            The Gay Lobby wants to lower the age of consent and have sex with young people, even children. However, when family activists quote Gay Manifestoes and gays who want to lower the age of consensual sex to legally sleep with children this is "Nazi" talk. Is this the same as the Nazi claim that Jews are child murderers?

            The website concludes by comparing someone's fear that gays would destroy themselves with infectious diseases to Hitler's goal of murdering all Jews.

            When I ran for the office of County Executive, the Rockland, N.Y. newspaper wrote about me, "No Room for Political Hate" and compared me with Adolph Hitler. It demanded that I present issues other than homosexuality. I responded that I had solutions for many social and economic problems, (approved by leading government and private industry scientists) but the paper only focused on my attack on the Gay Lobby, and twisted my remarks. Eventually, the people at the paper got to know me better, and always presented my ideas. Even today, it calls for a quote on various issues. The managing editor even invited me to speak at the Bear Mountain retreat and appeared in footage for my cable television show.

            I would like the people at hatecrime.org to give me an opportunity to explain why I am not a Nazi, and why the Gay Lobby is a problem for so many sincere and good people. If only we can talk instead of call names, we can learn, as they did at Gannet, that understanding is better.