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Greece, Persia and the Success of the Gay Lobby

 

By Rabbi David Eidensohn

 

            Anyone who follows the battles between the Gay Lobby and traditional America wonders how a small and marginalized element could utterly confound its enemies and emerge as the strongest lobby in America. Why are the gays winning so handily against the much larger population of biblical people? To understand, we must go back to the ancient wars between Greece and Persia, about 2,500 years ago. The Persians had huge armies, much larger than the Greek phalanxes, but repeatedly, the Greeks drove the Persians from the field in confusion. The Persian soldier was just as brave as the Greek, and a fierce and experienced fighter. The secret of the Greeks was in strategy. They knew how to coordinate their military. The pattern of battle was that the Persian cavalry and troops swarmed ferociously upon the small Greek army, and the battle was joined. The Greeks would make a certain turn or wheel, and the Persians were broken and fled. Sometimes the exact move broke the Persian attack battle after battle. The Persians never got it. Tactics and scientific militarism can destroy the horde.

            The Gay Lobby in the sixties was, to put it crudely but accurately by the lights of the culture, a pack of queers and perverts. We say this not to produce enmity, but to illustrate how far they have come. Historically, a group of people so utterly rejected by society has never gained control of that society as the gays have done, with such blinding speed. NBC television will not air any children programs this year, but features instead many gay programs. There is a serious debate among sexologists if heterosexuality is viable, and the major direction of sexology is to the gay camp. This week pediatricians came out for gays to adopt children. Throughout the western world, quoting the biblical injunction against homosexuality is considered hate speech, a crime.

            The triumph of the Communists and Nazis followed a similar pattern. A small and despised minority gained control of mighty countries with scientific organization, proficient propaganda, devoted fighters and fanaticism. The opposition was not organized, it was the Persian horde, and when the well-organized tactics of the minority were unleashed, they drove the majority away in confusion. All of this is history, some of it quite recent history, and we cannot dispute it. The question is what are we to do. Do we just surrender to the Gay Lobby, or do we adapt their tactics, the only ones that can succeed, and do things scientifically?

            The Religious Right learned in the time of the elder Bush how to do things scientifically. Pat Robertson used his political skills to defeat sitting president George Bush in a state presidential primary. From that time to the present things have gone down hill; Robertson's once mighty organization is in decline. In the 2,000-election year, about eight states held gay rights referendums and the religious lobby won most, albeit against huge funding for the gays. In 2,001 things went the other way, a great change in just one year. The fiasco in Maryland, where the entire pro-family community could not produce one home-state lawyer for a serious court case, shows just how far things have come. A lawyer had to be imported from out of state from a Religious Right organization.

            We haven't got very much time. If we don't identify the problem and do something about it, we will all be living in a very intolerant gay culture. They mean to utterly uproot any biblical influence, and our children will live in terrible times. What can we do? Rather, what should we stop doing? We are, after all, the majority. The gays are only about 2% of the population. What can we do with our resources, and why have we not prevailed? If we don't identify the problem soon, it will be too late.

            Recently, a tiff took place in the world of Christian radio broadcasting, as its new head decided to discontinue political broadcasts and to concentrate on religious spirituality. Those in the forefront of Religious Right political broadcasting took issue with this decision. We will leave them to their discussions, but note that this is one of the major problems. Religion and politics do not easily mesh. Politics is dirty grubby struggle, and spirituality is supposed to be different. Therefore, some religious people realize that entering politics can hurt its message; others counter that we cannot survive without fighting the gays and the radicals, and therefore, politics is an essential part of the ministry.

We are fighting the Gay Lobby with the Religious Right. This is not good for the Religious Right, and it is not good for the anti-gay struggle. The Religious Right is not about the Gay Lobby per se; it is about religion. It just so happens that the Religious Right is threatened by the gay lobby and so fights it. Nonetheless, the focus is not there. Not only is there a lack of focus, because the resources of the Religious Right must go for many things besides the fight against the gays, but because the Religious Right is foremost a religion, and needs to address spiritual issues, its involvement in politics is upsetting to many people. The very fact that the Religious Right fights the gays is one of the gay's strengths. The Religious Right is not just against the gays. It is against anyone who does not accept its version of salvation, and everyone else is damned to hell. Such people cannot fight the gay lobby, and if they do, the gay lobby rejoices.

            The key to fighting the Gay Lobby and winning is to imitate the Right to Life campaign. Years ago, a religious Catholic established a Right to Life political campaign with no religious overtones, and invited everyone to participate. There are atheists for life, such as the noted columnist Net Hentoff, there are gays for life, and the Right to Life lobby is respectable and quite powerful. Had Right to Life made the mistake of righting abortion with religion, it would never have achieved such influence. The failure of the Religious Right in its political battles is precisely because everyone knows that the Religious Right is not a political organization, but wants to get everyone to believe a certain way, and any political victory it gets, on any issue, will be used to Christianize America.

            As the Religious Right becomes more aggressive, it not only frightens off the secular people who might prefer that public schools not teach homosexuality to little children, it frightens the Catholics who are mortal enemies for centuries of the Protestant enthusiasts. It denies to the family lobby the resources of Jewish and Islam family-oriented communities, because they know that supporting the Religious Right will threaten their own religion. The key to the problem is that the Religious Right has as its overriding goal kingdom building, and the denial of the religion of others, and certainly the freedom of atheists and agnostics. The Christians on the Religious Right want to teach Christianity in public schools, and they want America as a culture and government to recognize the primacy of Christianity. This at one time was not a threat, because it was not a serious effort at conversion. Today, the Religious Right has made it clear that it wants the whole nine yards. It is fighting to convert everyone, and so its political triumphs are just preparations for the true goal, making a proper Christian of everyone. This guarantees that all those who resist the acceptance of the Religious Right's type of Christianity will resist every political issue that the Religious Right embraces. Of course, the Religious Right will deny this, and say that their motives are far more benign, but who believes them? If they were religious people in a secular organization, such as Right to Life, people could believe it, because they are officially secular. If, however, they enter politics to gain power under the kingdom-building religious system, they turn politics, at least as people view it, into a device for mass-conversions.

            It is interesting to note the difference in this regard among the various religions. Catholics take seriously their public relations problems. They know that people are not going to accept a religion that consigns Jews to hell, at least not after Hitler. So a few months ago, the Pope's Theologian wrote an article saying that Jews may legitimately not accept Christian beliefs. The conservative Catholics were upset by this reversal of theology, but the Vatican had done something to burnish its image. Nobody is fooled of course, when such a momentous document is written in French and Italian and not released publicly, only discovered by some news bureau. This smacks of cleverness, but nonetheless, it is something. The Religious Right Protestants, on the other hand, make no bones of the fact that the Jews must be converted, and that whoever does not accept their grace is on the outs with heaven.

            This brings us to another problem. When the same people who are responsible for converting everyone are making the speeches read by the masses, it is inevitable that in the enthusiasm for firing up the troops, something insensitive will be blurted out or said. Both Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have made insensitive remarks about Jews, although neither is an anti-Semite. They did this because the way you talk to your own in a moment of ecclesiastical passion, condemning those outside the church, cannot be broadcast in the modern world. When the religious firebrands are quoted once too often, it greatly damages the image of the entire religious movement and gives at least the impression of bigotry and intolerance.

            After the Second World War, Europe cleaned out the influence of the church, blaming it for the hate that consumed the continent. Only in America is there religious influence, but this is threatened. Nobody outside of it is destroying the American church, although the gays are surely trying their best. The damage to the church is mostly self-inflicted, and indeed, the Bishop of England made a speech where he bemoaned the decline of religion and spoke of the mistakes and horrors of the religion itself, such as the pedophile priests that have warped the name of a once-proud religion. The Catholics are working hard to deal with their image, such as when the Pope apologized to the Jews and the Orthodox Russian church, both who suffered from the church. On the other hand, and this is the crucial problem, the theology and the religion, the history of the church, do not vanish with an apology. Not long after the Pope apologized, the Orthodox prelate complained, and the apology did not do its intended work. A few months after traveling to Jerusalem and apologizing to the Jews for the suffering the church caused the Jewish people, the Pope invited the Nazi Haeder from Austria to the Vatican, and honored him with the lighting of a Christmas tree. Haider, who until then had been a pariah in Austria, returned to Vienna and began to openly attack individual Jews, and nobody complained. This shows to the carefully observer, that cleverness and gestures cannot eradicate the soul of the theology and attitudes of thousands of years. It also shows that as long as the fight against the gays is attached to such religious efforts, it is doomed. At least the Catholics are making gestures and important theological innovations to raise them above the charge that they promote hate by excluding others from salvation. The American Protestants, on the other hand, are going strong, utterly disinterested in what people think of them. They openly proclaim the need to convert Jews, and make it clear that any Jew who is not converted is doomed. There are no apologies, and no theological changes. This week I saw a publication in the forefront of the wars with the radicals publish an statement that only those who believe such and such are worthy of Salvation, and I realized that the entire power of this publication is now jeopardized.

            If people kept Clinton in office, it is precisely because they feared such publications more than Clinton's vices. As the Religious Right expands its media, and as more people come to read its opinions on life in America, it must choose between talking about Salvation only for so and so and being a true player in the political realm.

            The history of Christianity is one of great feuds and fights, often very bloody ones. Jacques Barzun, in his modern classic From Dawn to Decadence, says that after the seventeenth century Thirty Years War, the religious leaders of the exhausted combatants instituted the first steps towards secularizing society to save it from religious war. Since then, as religious warfare continued unabated, as countries were racked with competing kingdom builders, secularism grew stronger. Secularism is not a product of the atheist and agnostic; it is the natural by-product of a religious community anxious to survive. Whenever a religious element attempts to re-enter the political thicket, the instincts of centuries is aroused, not only among secular people, but among religious people, who do not want to go that route again, and devote their lives and their energies to more and more religious hate and feuding.

            We must stop fighting the gay lobby as part of the process of kingdom building or any other religious act. We must fight the gay lobby as the Right to Life movement showed us, by allowing deeply religious people to form an organization open to all; we need a secular organization for all traditional people.

            Most people know that there is a fight going on, but they don't realize how bad it is. I just got off the phone with National Public Radio. As you may recall, NPR insinuated that Traditional Values Coalition was suspected of being the anthrax poisoner! When confronted with the utter absurdity of their claim, NPR issued, not an apology, but a "correction." Furthermore, the "correction" is available only if you go back to their site to find it. Those who heard the slander on the radio are left with the impression that TVC is a suspect of mass murder. Why, I asked NPR, can't you apologize? Do you think that Religious Right people are untermenshen?

            Seven months ago, together with some Religious Right activists who accepted the logic a secular organization, I founded the National Non-Sectarian Council of Pro-Family Activists to battle the gay lobby. We are a website, Gender Central (www.gendercentral.com), and provide opinion pieces and contact information for America's top family activists. Although we are not a large organization, when we issue press releases, when we call politicians, we do so in a focused, secular sense that gets respect. We call only about the gay issue and gender issues, and have no baggage to color our requests and demands. If only we had a truly unified but secular organization, one with no side issues, devoted to stopping the gays, how much could be done. In fact, we could even approximate or do more than the gay lobby itself! We could stop being Persians and become the Greek phalanx, moving focused and sure into the battle, and winning.

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