| Greece, Persia and the Success of the Gay Lobby | |
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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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D. Eidensohn's poem
"The Wall" won an International Poetry Contest. His poems appear in
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