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Tuesday, October 18, 2005
THE MARKETING OF EVIL
How 'gay rights' is being sold
to America
Exposed: Powerful manipulation techniques behind radical homosexual agenda
Posted: October 18, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Editor's note: Following is the highly acclaimed – and to many, shocking – first chapter of WND Managing Editor David Kupelian's blockbuster book, "The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom." In it, Kupelian rips the veil off the previously hidden marketing strategies and powerful propaganda techniques used with such stunning success to "sell" Americans on homosexuality and the radical "gay rights" agenda over the last few years – a marketing juggernaut that continues to accelerate daily.
SPECIAL OFFER: For a limited time, get "The Marketing of Evil," widely praised as the "must-read" book of the year, autographed and personalized at no extra charge. See details at end.
By David Kupelian
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
"I did not choose to be homosexual. I would change my sexual orientation if that were within my power."
So confessed Robert Bauman, the powerful conservative congressman from Maryland. Americans were stunned in 1980 when headlines revealed Bauman had been caught red-handed having a sexual rendezvous with a young male prostitute. In his book "The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative," Bauman revealed the conditions that shaped his own tortured double life as a pro-family Republican congressman and closet homosexual.
At the tender age of five, Bauman had been sexually seduced by a twelve-year-old neighbor. Reflecting on that pivotal experience, as well as subsequent similar episodes, Bauman described the powerful feelings he found welling up within him at a young age:
This was not a matter of chance attraction to a forbidden object. This was a frightening force from deep within my being, an involuntary reaction to the sight, smell, and feel of other boys. I neither understood nor accepted it. And I came to hate myself because of the presence within me of this horrible weakness, this uncleanness of spirit over which I seemed to have no control. …
I was sure my predicament was a unique punishment designed only for me. Unable to understand it myself, I could never even attempt an explanation to someone else. I countered my dilemma with a plan that constituted the essence of simplicity. I made up my mind that I was not "queer." I heard all those denunciations of homos by my military school peers and firmly resolved I could never be considered one of such a despicable breed.
Bauman was elected in 1973 as representative of the First Congressional District of Maryland, became chairman of the American Conservative Union in 1979, and, many thought, was on his way to becoming Speaker of the House. But he was leading a double life as a married man with four children while at the same time engaging in anonymous homosexual one-night stands. He described the wrenching emotional aftermath he experienced after every episode: "Each time I would feel great guilt and head for Saturday confession at St. Peter's or St. Joseph's on Capitol Hill so I could make amends with God and be in the state of grace for Sunday Communion. I would always vow to myself and God I would never do it again."
Submerging himself "in the excitement of politics where compliments, victories and deference helped reassure me I was a good person," Bauman looked every bit the quintessential conservative, family-values congressman. "If I could save the world," he later mused, "I might avoid having to save myself." Looking back on his secret double life, Bauman engaged in some painful self-examination:
How could any normal and moral human being do what I did? How could anyone, however callous, repeatedly be unfaithful to one’s spouse (lying, evading responsibility, breaking solemn vows)? I have described how it could be done. Why I did it is the serious question. And I have no answer, even to this day. I do not know. In many ways I was driven by a force over which I seemed to have little control.
Of course, my choice was conscious and deliberate. It could have been altered. But some compulsion drove me, blotting out all I had learned, diminishing in importance all that was most dear and important. I seemed willing to risk my marriage, my wife and children, even life itself.
It's hard not to have compassion on a fellow human being desperately struggling to overcome a powerful compulsion he "neither understood nor accepted." What happened to Bauman was a tragedy. He needed help – not rejection and condemnation for being a "queer," nor acceptance and praise for being an "oppressed minority" – but real help in understanding and overcoming his sexual problem.
In today's polarized climate, however, it seems most of us either condemn homosexuals as evil corrupters of society or we fawn over them as noble victims and cultural heroes. We either accuse them of "choosing" to be "wicked sexual deviants," or we claim – utterly without evidence – that "gayness" is an inborn, genetic trait.
Reality, however, lies somewhere else. Deep down, people of conscience know homosexuality is neither an innocent, inborn "minority" characteristic like skin color, nor a conscious choice to become evil and to corrupt others. But without understanding what we're really dealing with, we're not only powerless to help others but easily confused and corrupted ourselves.
Bauman, under the sway of an overwhelming and self-destructive compulsion, even admits in retrospect that perhaps he wanted to be caught so he could get help:
I can see numerous instances when my conduct, which I thought carefully discreet, was really designed to reveal to someone, anyone, what was happening to me. Perhaps my unconscious conclusion was that someone else must deal with the chaos of my life because I was rapidly reaching the point at which I could not do it myself.
Finally, in 1980, at the age of forty-three, Bauman got his wish and was found out. After the dramatic public exposure of his solicitation of a teenage male hustler, the congressman saw his political career crash. He lost not only his reelection bid but also his family, his historic home, and many of his powerful friends as well.
In truth, Robert Bauman’s sad story is in some ways not too different from that of many others in America before today's era of "gay pride," out-of-the-closet politicians and celebrities, "lesbian and gay studies" in most colleges, "Gay Day" at Disneyland, and powerful homosexual lobbying and journalistic and legal groups throughout the land.
Back then, most people like Bauman remained "in the closet" with regard to their homosexuality. And in their secret world they suffered conflict, fear of exposure, and sometimes worse.
Today, thanks to America's politically correct "gay-friendly" culture, millions of human beings in the grip of this same unnatural sexual compulsion find it much easier to accept – even to wear as a badge of honor.
But they still don't understand it. In fact, they have less desire than ever to understand it – just as the larger society has also lost interest in understanding homosexuality. But sometimes not knowing what you're dealing with can be dangerous. So let's take off the rainbow-colored glasses and objectively explore this phenomenon we call "gay rights."
It grew out of the "sexual liberation" movement of the 1960s. To be precise, the June 11, 1969, "Stonewall riot" – when a group of homosexuals at New York City's Stonewall Inn resisted police commands to disperse – is widely regarded as the birth of the "gay liberation" movement.
This emerging political force made considerable strides during the '70s, most notably in persuading – many say intimidating – the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 into removing homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders. But "gay rights" was young, inexperienced, underfunded, and understaffed as political movements go, and the issue received little support from politicians or the nation in general.
"Equality for gays" was not yet a phrase that reverberated in the hearts and minds of Americans. Then came AIDS.
The problem of the plague
Surely, many activists thought, this would be their movement's death knell. For while they were trying to convince the mainstream that homosexuals represented a normal, healthy, alternative lifestyle, along comes a modern plague – horrible, incurable, fatal, and spread primarily by promiscuous homosexual men.
AIDS – originally named GRID (gay-related immunodeficiency disease) until activist homosexuals pressured the medical establishment to switch to the generic acronym AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) – was the ultimate public relations nightmare. It gave society a brand-new reason to fear and shun homosexuals – namely, concern over becoming infected with a nightmarish new disease.
And AIDS did something else. In order for the medical establishment and news media to communicate to the public how the disease was being transmitted, it became necessary to focus publicly on the one thing homosexuals most wanted to downplay – the sometimes-bizarre sexual acts in which they engage and their often astronomically high numbers of sexual partners. (A widely cited 1978 study by Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Wineburg reported that 43 percent of homosexuals had more than five hundred sex partners during their lifetime.)
In addition, the "silver bullet" medical cure Americans had virtually come to expect, having grown up in the age of miracle drugs like the polio vaccine and penicillin, never materialized. Rather, AIDS experts and public health authorities issued dire warnings about a disease reminiscent of the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages:
By the early years of the next century, we could have lost between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. There’s no question about that. –Surgeon General C. Everett Koop
Ninety percent of the people infected [with HIV] don’t even know it. – Dr. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the HIV virus
In many areas, the number of persons affected with the AIDS virus is at least 100 times greater than reported case of AIDS. – Dr. James Curran, director of AIDS and HIV immunology and prevention activities at the Centers for Disease Control
Meanwhile, throughout the '80s and beyond, as AIDS infection and death rates skyrocketed with each passing year, high-profile figures were dying of the disease, including actor Rock Hudson in 1985, ABC News anchor Max Robinson in 1988, and ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev in 1993.
During this time the public experienced two distinct and widespread reactions to the unfolding AIDS epidemic. One was the natural sympathy evoked by witnessing the terrible suffering and death of AIDS victims.
But the other, if less politically correct, was fear and loathing of homosexuals. After all, there was no way back in those early days of the disease to rule out AIDS transmission via "casual contact" – that is, by means other than sex and intravenous drug use. As prominent Harvard AIDS researcher Dr. William Haseltine warned at the time: "Anyone who tells you categorically that AIDS is not contracted by saliva is not telling you the truth. AIDS may, in fact, be transmissible by tears, saliva, bodily fluids and mosquito bites."
Fears that AIDS would "break out" into the general population were further fanned by horror stories such as that of Kimberly Bergalis, a Florida girl who contracted AIDS (along with several other patients) from her homosexual dentist, David Acer.
As a matter of fact, many Americans not part of the two main "at-risk groups" (male homosexuals and IV drug abusers) were dying, mostly from HIV-tainted blood transfusions. One of them, Ryan White, an eighteen-year-old Indiana boy with hemophilia who became infected with HIV through a blood transfusion, died of AIDS in 1990 and became the poster boy for rallying Americans to support AIDS research. Two years later tennis great Arthur Ashe, also infected by an HIV-tainted transfusion, succumbed to the disease.
As a public relations matter, AIDS was daunting. This modern plague, if not handled brilliantly in the court of public opinion, could result in homosexuals being widely shunned. On the other hand, perhaps the sympathy factor could be harnessed and multiplied to advance the activists' cause. The movement definitely needed help.
The defiant, storm-trooper tactics of in-your-face groups like ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) may or may not have been successful in pressuring the federal government to increase its commitment to combating AIDS. But such tactics definitely were successful in giving activist homosexuals a very bad name.
One infamous incident was the assault on New York’s famed St. Patrick's Cathedral on December 10, 1989. While Cardinal John O'Connor presided over the 10:15 Sunday morning Mass, a multitude of "pro-choice" and "gay rights" activists protested angrily outside. Some, wearing gold-colored robes similar to clerical vestments, hoisted a large portrait of a pornographically altered frontal nude portrait of Jesus.
"You bigot, O'Connor, you're killing us!" screamed one protester, while signs called the archbishop "Murderer!"
Then it got really ugly. Scores of protesters entered the church, resulting in what many in the packed house of parishioners described as a "nightmare."
"The radical homosexuals turned a celebration of the Holy Eucharist into a screaming babble of sacrilege by standing in the pews, shouting and waving their fists, tossing condoms into the air," recounted the New York Post. One of the invaders grabbed a consecrated wafer and threw it to the ground.
Outside, demonstrators, many of them members of ACT-UP, carried placards that summed up their sentiments toward the Catholic Church: "Keep your church out of my crotch." "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries." "Eternal life to Cardinal John O'Connor NOW!" "Curb your dogma."
Clearly, the young movement was flirting with oblivion if it persisted in such ugly, indefensible tactics. It needed a new, more civilized direction if it ever hoped to convince Americans that homosexuality was a perfectly normal alternative lifestyle.
This new direction would somehow have to convert the fearsome AIDS epidemic from a negative into a positive. What was needed was a comprehensive, long-term public relations campaign that had to be brilliantly conceived and skillfully executed.
War conference
In February 1988, some 175 leading activists representing homosexual groups from across the nation held a war conference in Warrenton, Virginia, to map out their movement’s future. Shortly thereafter, activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen put into book form the comprehensive public relations plan they had been advocating with their gay-rights peers for several years.
Kirk and Madsen were not the kind of drooling activists that would burst into churches and throw condoms in the air. They were smart guys – very smart. Kirk, a Harvard-educated researcher in neuropsychiatry, worked with the Johns Hopkins Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth and designed aptitude tests for adults with 200+ IQs. Madsen, with a doctorate in politics from Harvard, was an expert on public persuasion tactics and social marketing. Together they wrote "After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90s."
"As cynical as it may seem," they explained at the outset, "AIDS gives us a chance, however brief, to establish ourselves as a victimized minority legitimately deserving of America's special protection and care. At the same time," they warned, "it generates mass hysteria of precisely the sort that has brought about public stonings and leper colonies since the Dark Ages and before. … How can we maximize the sympathy and minimize the fear? How, given the horrid hand that AIDS has dealt us, can we best play it?"
The bottom line of Kirk and Madsen's master plan? "The campaign we outline in this book, though complex, depends centrally upon a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising."
Arguing that, skillfully handled, the AIDS epidemic could conquer American resistance to homosexuality and form the basis of a comprehensive, long-term marketing campaign to sell "gay rights" to straight America, "After the Ball" became the public-relations "bible" of the movement.
Kirk and Madsen's "war goal," explains marketing expert Paul E. Rondeau of Regent University, was to "force acceptance of homosexual culture into the mainstream, to silence opposition, and ultimately to convert American society." In his comprehensive study, "Selling Homosexuality to America," Rondeau writes:
The extensive three-stage strategy to Desensitize, Jam and Convert the American public is reminiscent of George Orwell’s premise of goodthink and badthink in "1984." As Kirk and Madsen put it, "To one extent or another, the separability – and manipulability – of the verbal label is the basis for all the abstract principles underlying our proposed campaign."
Separability? Manipulability? Allow me to translate this psychological marketing jargon: We can change what people actually think and feel by breaking their current negative associations with our cause and replacing them with positive associations.
Simple case in point: homosexual activists call their movement "gay rights." This accomplishes two major objectives: (1) Use of the word gay rather than homosexual masks the controversial sexual behavior involved and accentuates instead a vague but positive-sounding cultural identity – gay, which, after all, once meant "happy"; and (2) describing their battle from the get-go as one over "rights" implies homosexuals are being denied the basic freedoms of citizenship that others enjoy.
So merely by using the term gay rights, and persuading politicians and the media to adopt this terminology, activists seeking to transform America have framed the terms of the debate in their favor almost before the contest begins. (And in public relations warfare, he who frames the terms of the debate almost always wins. The abortion rights movement has prevailed in that war precisely because it succeeded, early on, in framing the debate as a question, not of abortion, but of choice. The abortion vanguard correctly anticipated that it would be far easier to defend an abstract, positive-sounding idea like choice than the unrestricted slaughter of unborn babies.)
Okay, you might be wondering, even granting the movement's cutting-edge marketing savvy, how do you sell middle America on those five hundred sex partners and weird sexual practices? Answer, according to Kirk and Madsen, you don't. Just don't talk about it. Rather, look and act as normal as possible for the camera.
"When you're very different, and people hate you for it," they explain, "this is what you do: first you get your foot in the door, by being as similar as possible; then, and only then – when your one little difference is finally accepted – can you start dragging in your other peculiarities, one by one. You hammer in the wedge narrow end first. As the saying goes, allow the camel's nose beneath your tent, and his whole body will soon follow."
In other words, sadomasochists, leather fetishists, cross-dressers, transgenders, and other "peculiar" members of the homosexual community need to keep away from the tent and out of sight while the sales job is under way. Later, once the camel is safely inside, there will be room for all.
Rondeau explains Kirk and Madsen's techniques of "desensitization," "jamming," and "conversion" this way:
Desensitization is described as inundating the public in a "continuous flood of gay-related advertising, presented in the least offensive fashion possible. If straights can't shut off the shower, they may at least eventually get used to being wet." But, the activists did not mean advertising in the usual marketing context but, rather, quite a different approach: "The main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome." They add, "[S]eek desensitization and nothing more. … If you can get [straights] to think [homosexuality] is just another thing – meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders – then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won."
This planned hegemony is a variant of the type that Michael Warren describes in "Seeing Through the Media" where it "is not raw overt coercion; it is one group's covert orchestration of compliance by another group through structuring the consciousness of the second group."
"Structuring the consciousness" of others? If that phraseology is uncomfortably reminiscent of various mind control and brainwashing tales you might have heard over the years, don’t be surprised. Manipulating the emotions and thereby restructuring the thoughts and beliefs of large numbers of people is what modern marketing is all about.
"Jamming," explains Rondeau, "is psychological terrorism meant to silence expression of or even support for dissenting opinion." Radio counselor and psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger experienced big-time jamming during the run-up to her planned television show. Outraged over a single comment critical of homosexuals she had made on her radio program, activists launched a massive intimidation campaign against the television program's advertisers. As a result, the new show was stillborn.
But perhaps the highest-profile example of jamming occurred after the 1998 murder of University of Wyoming freshman Matthew Shepard. Lured from a bar, robbed and savagely beaten by two men, Shepard died five days later of head injuries. In the frenzied, saturation media coverage that followed, the press and homosexual activists singled out conservative Christians as having created a "climate of anti-gay hate" in which such a brutal act could happen.
NBC's Today show took the lead, focusing on a Christian ad campaign running at the time that offered to help homosexuals change their orientation. Reporter David Gregory narrated: "The ads were controversial for portraying gays and lesbians as sinners who had made poor choices, despite the growing belief that homosexuality may be genetic. … Have the ads fostered a climate of anti-gay hate that leads to incidents like the killing of Matthew Shepard? Gay rights activists say the ads convey a message that gay people are defective."
And in a now-infamous interview, Today's Katie Couric asked Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer: "Some gay rights activists have said that some conservative political organizations like the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family are contributing to this anti-homosexual atmosphere by having an ad campaign saying if you are a homosexual you can change your orientation. That prompts people to say, 'If I meet someone who's homosexual, I'm going to take action to try to convince them or try to harm them.' Do you believe that such groups are contributing to this climate?"
Consciously or not, the media were following Kirk and Madsen's playbook to the letter, discrediting anyone who disagreed with the homosexual agenda by associating them with lowlife murderers. In reality, none of the Christian groups smeared by NBC had ever condoned mistreatment of homosexuals – in fact, they had explicitly condemned it.
As if to add even more shame to the whole-hog jamming of Christians after the Shepard murder, in 2004 a comprehensive new investigation by ABC News 20/20 concluded that homosexuality very likely wasn't a factor in Shepard's murder, but rather Shepard had been targeted for his money.
So much for desensitization and jamming. But what about "conversion"? Here, Kirk and Madsen announce defiantly:
We mean conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media. We mean "subverting" the mechanism of prejudice to our own ends – using the very processes that made America hate us to turn their hatred into warm regard – whether they like it or not.
Transforming another person’s hatred into love ("warm regard") is the object of classic brainwashing. As Kirk and Madsen explain:
In Conversion, we mimic the natural process of stereotype-learning, with the following effect: we take the bigot's good feelings about all-right guys, and attach them to the label "gay," either weakening or, eventually, replacing his bad feelings toward the label and the prior stereotype. … Whereas in Jamming the target is shown a bigot being rejected by his crowd for his prejudice against gays, in Conversion the target is shown his crowd actually associating with gays in good fellowship. Once again, it's very difficult for the average person, who, by nature and training, almost invariably feels what he sees his fellows feeling, not to respond in this knee-jerk fashion to a sufficiently calculated advertisement.
We're talking about some serious messing around with Americans' minds here. Do the homosexual activists thus engaged really know they're deceiving the public, or are they convinced they're just telling the truth?
"It makes no difference that the ads are lies," write Kirk and Madsen, "not to us, because we're using them to ethically good effect, to counter negative stereotypes that are every bit as much lies, and far more wicked ones."
Homosexualizing history
Another important technique promoted by "After the Ball," and employed repeatedly to great effect in recent years, is to claim that famous historical figures – "from Socrates to Eleanor Roosevelt, Tchaikovsky to Bessie Smith, Alexander the Great to Alexander Hamilton, and Leonardo da Vinci to Walt Whitman" – were homosexual or bisexual.
Although the authors know these claims are unproven at best and often baseless (they refer to them as "suspected 'inverts'"), that doesn't stop them from advocating the tactic.
A recent example of this was the highly publicized, though utterly unsubstantiated, speculation that Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual. Even more outrageous was the suggestion by openly "gay" New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson – a comment he quickly retracted after a firestorm of protest – that Jesus Christ was a homosexual!
As Kirk and Madsen explain:
Famous historical figures are considered especially useful to us for two reasons: first, they are invariably dead as a doornail, hence in no position to deny the truth and sue for libel. Second, and more serious, the virtues and accomplishments that make these historic gay figures admirable cannot be gainsaid or dismissed by the public, since high school history textbooks have already set them in incontrovertible cement.
The flip side of this "celebrity endorsement" tactic consists of associating all detractors of the radical homosexual agenda with negative images of universally despised tyrants and lowlifes. "After the Ball" lists some of the negative images with which opponents should be associated – including "Klansmen demanding that gays be slaughtered or castrated," "hysterical backwoods preachers, drooling with hate," "menacing punks, thugs and convicts who speak coolly about the 'fags' they have bashed," and a "tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed."
Indeed, says Rondeau, "perhaps the most menacing focus of the campaign is the special treatment reserved for the religious dissenters. The strategy is to 'jam homohatred by linking it to Nazi horror.'"
Kirk and Madsen explain the leverage gained by this nasty technique:
Most contemporary hate groups on the Religious Right will bitterly resent the implied connection between homohatred and Nazi fascism. But since they can't defend the latter, they'll end up having to distance themselves by insisting that they would never go to such extremes. Such declarations of civility toward gays, of course, set our worst detractors on the slippery slope toward recognition of fundamental gay rights.
Homosexual activists love to compare their opponents with Adolf Hitler and Nazis, apparently undaunted by the fact that, according to William L. Shirer's twelve-hundred-page "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," widely regarded as the definitive book on Nazi Germany, "many of the early Nazis" were homosexuals.
But this is not about truth. It's about manipulation. In a sense, modern psychology-based marketers understand people better than people understand themselves. They use emotional threads to tie their "product" (in this case, homosexuality) to preexisting positive attributes in the consumers' mind. And in a cultural-political campaign like this, they also successfully tie all who oppose their agenda to preexisting negatives, such as Nazis. The net effect of this conditioning can be so powerful over time that ultimately one's prior beliefs – based on experience, religious training, conscience, and common sense – are overwhelmed and replaced as a result of successive waves of emotion-driven reprogramming.
Still, one wonders how the press could allow itself to be used in such a blatantly propagandistic way and in pursuit of such a subversive agenda. And make no mistake, the "gay rights" agenda, which includes indoctrinating kindergartners with pro-homosexual propaganda and legalizing same-sex marriage, is extraordinarily subversive to America's foundational values and institutions.
For the answer to that question you have to realize what's happened to the news media in recent years.
As you no doubt already know, the establishment press is oriented far to the left of the American mainstream, as study after study for the past three decades has documented beyond rational dispute. But did you know that, in addition, a major homosexual presence has emerged in the "mainstream" media, especially since the dawn of the 1990s?
Indeed, part of the mobilization that occurred in the wake of the 1988 War Conference was the recognition that the news media represented the prime tool for changing the hearts and minds of Americans.
And if getting your message before the media was the name of the game, how much better would it be to actually be the media? Thus 1990 saw the launch of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), which has since grown into a formidable organization.
To celebrate its tenth anniversary, homosexual journalists from many major news organizations gathered in San Francisco for NLGJA's gala conference held September 7-10, 2000. The discussion on center stage was surreal. It focused on the question of whether or not, when reporting on stories related to homosexuality, mainstream journalists have a responsibility to include any viewpoints that contradict those of homosexuals. You heard me right.
MSNBC producer Ramon Escobar framed the issue this way: "This whole issue of 'balance' that we as journalists are supposed to achieve. … When we cover the black community, I've never seen a newsroom where you're covering one side and then you have to go run out and get the Klan's point of view: 'Well, I've got to go do my Klan interview.' How do you be fair?"
NLGJA member Jeffrey Kofman, at the time a CBS correspondent who later migrated to NBC, restated the question: "The argument [is]: Why do we constantly see in coverage of gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues the homophobes and the fag-haters quoted in stories when, of course, we don't do that with Jews, blacks, etcetera?"
Paula Madison, vice president of diversity at NBC and news director of WNBC in New York, added: "I agree with him. I don’t see why we would seek out … the absurd, inane point of view just to get another point of view."
"All of us," Kofman rejoined, "have seen and continue to see a lot of coverage that includes perspectives on gay issues that include people who just simply are intolerant and perhaps not qualified as well."
Are you getting the picture? Whereas fifty years ago a news story portraying homosexuality as normal and respectable was unheard of, now we're facing exactly the opposite spectacle. Up on that glitzy convention stage were representatives of top broadcast news networks debating whether or not professional journalists should give voice to the Christian or traditional viewpoint on homosexuality. Or, they suggested, Wouldn't it be better just to censor such "hateful" and "bigoted" viewpoints as being the moral equivalent of a "pro-racism" or "pro-bigotry" viewpoint, and thus beyond the margins of civilized debate?
By the way, lest you think this was just an unrepresentative group of radical journalists blowing off steam in their off-hours, here’s who sponsored this particular homosexual journalists conference: Hearst Newspapers; Knight-Ridder, Inc.; CBS News; Gannett Foundation; CNN; Bloomberg News; NBC News; the Dallas Morning News; Fox News Channel; the Los Angeles Times; the New York Daily News; the San Francisco Chronicle; Time, Inc.; the Wall Street Journal; the Washington Post; and the San Jose Mercury News.
No wonder the "mainstream press," overwhelmingly sympathetic toward the "gay rights" agenda, seems to be on the same page as homosexual activists engaged in desensitizing, jamming, and converting Americans to their world view. As a matter of fact, as we saw in the Matthew Shepard case, it's hard to tell them apart.
Thus a lot of the credit for the "gay-ing of America" can be laid at the door of the news media who, intentionally or not, have worked in tandem with the movement's public relations machinery for years now.
We forgot one thing
Today, the homosexual activist movement is a juggernaut, racking up success after success. Even the occasional losses, such as voter rejection of same-sex marriage in the 2004 election, are simply the expected "one step back" in the time-honored "two steps forward one step back" mode of most long-term political wars. (After all, by audaciously conducting thousands of illegal same-sex marriage ceremonies, homosexuals all but guaranteed legal and social acceptance of their fall-back position – homosexual civil unions with the full legal force of marriage, something most Americans regarded as radical and unacceptable just a few years ago.)
As just one of a multitude of success indicators, consider that the popular teen magazine Seventeen conducted a reader poll in 1991, shortly after activist homosexuals abandoned the streets in favor of the television studio. At the time, only 17 percent of the magazine's adolescent readers accepted homosexuality as appropriate. In 1999, after eight years of intense "gay rights" marketing, a whopping 54 percent, more than three times as many teens, accepted homosexuality as appropriate. This stunning turnaround is reflected in virtually every area of society.
Whether in culture, politics, law, business, the news media, entertainment, education, or even the church, homosexual strides have been nothing short of astonishing. Once condemned as "immoral deviants," homosexuals and lesbians today are honored, idealized, defended as victims, and celebrated as role models. Thanks to "hate-crimes" legislation, they are now afforded extra protections as a special class of people – protections not granted to all members of society. (If you were assaulted, the perpetrator would get one sentence, but if you were assaulted because of your homosexuality, the perpetrator would receive a more severe sentence under hate-crimes sentencing guidelines.)
Meanwhile, in what was once a vibrant Judeo-Christian culture, Christians and other proponents of traditional biblical principles are routinely cast as bigots and "homophobes," thanks to constant jamming.
Direct quotes from the Bible regarding homosexuality are routinely condemned as "hate speech," and – as we have seen – pro-homosexual journalists piously agonize over whether or not they should dignify the traditional, biblical viewpoint by even acknowledging it.
Multitudes of activists – with almost limitless time and energy to devote to advancing their agenda, largely unencumbered by any need to change diapers, pay for dental braces, or attend their children's soccer games, as do most heterosexual married people – have succeeded in their goal of transforming society. As public relations campaigns go, it’s been an unqualified success.
However, in the "gay rights" movement's relentless struggle to legitimize homosexuality, and in the greater society's veneration of them as heroes of the great civil rights crusade of the new millennium, we've forgotten one thing. In the endlessly clever media campaign that's bamboozled everyone, "restructured their consciousness," turned their hate into love and their rejection into acceptance, something crucial has been lost.
We've forgotten about reality. We've been living in a Madison Avenue fantasy world of marketing images and carefully crafted rhetoric in the foreground, with court battles, fascistlike intimidation, and relentless waves of persuasion in the background.
But what about the truth we've left behind? What about the reality of homosexuality, of what causes it, and of what it means physically and spiritually for those so oriented? Do we even care any more?
Let's rewind and go back to former Congressman Robert Bauman, who in poignantly describing his internal struggles against his homosexual compulsions confided that he had been sexually seduced when he was five years old by an older boy.
Did that experience have anything to do with Bauman’s future homosexuality?
There was a time when psychiatry, psychology, religion, and common sense all said "yes." In fact, sexually abused young males are "up to 7 times more likely to self-identify as gay or bisexual than peers who had not been abused," concludes the peer-reviewed 1998 study, "Sexual Abuse of Boys," by William C. Holmes, M.D. and Gail B. Slap, M.D.
On that topic, a reader recently wrote to me: "We are a family of eight siblings and the oldest is gay, and has lived with the same partner for 41 years. At various times, my siblings and I have tried to discover why he is gay and none of the rest of us are. We finally found out through an older cousin that my brother was repeatedly sexually molested when he was six years old by a 19-year-old man."
Even Kirk and Madsen, who advise activists to claim they were born homosexual, know better. "We argue that, for all practical purposes, gays should be considered to have been born gay," they write, "even though sexual orientation, for most humans, seems to be the product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence."
If "environmental factors" are involved – and everyone knows they are, whether or not they publicly admit it – why then advise homosexuals to claim they were "born gay"?
"To suggest in public that homosexuality might be chosen," Kirk and Madsen explain, "is to open the can of worms labeled 'moral choices and sin' and give the religious intransigents a stick to beat us with. Straights must be taught that it is as natural for some persons to be homosexual as it is for others to be heterosexual: wickedness and seduction have nothing to do with it."
Unfortunately, with all the brainy marketing behind the campaign to mainstream homosexuality, what's been swept under the rug is the recognition – once commonplace in America – that flawed early relationships or sexual victimization can put a child on the road to homosexuality.
Children are exquisitely impressionable, so much so that sexual seduction or assault is a major trauma that can, and often does, reprogram the victim's identity – his view of who and what he is. While the Holmes and Slap study confirms this, the point is self-evident: our prisons are full of child molesters who were molested as children and batterers who were battered as children.
What about the twelve-year-old who molested Bauman? What caused him to sexually seduce a five-year-old boy? No doubt he felt a strong compulsion to do to a new kid what had been done to him. But why?
An innocent young child has a "bright light" quality that feels mysteriously threatening to those in the grip of corruption. In fact, many see this dynamic at the core of a great deal of child abuse.
To the person who's already been "converted" and is acting out the homosexual "lifestyle," it’s deeply satisfying – far beyond mere sexual pleasure – to "initiate" an innocent person. Doing so serves to anesthetize his own conscience and assuage his inner conflict by destroying the innocence of another person, since that innocence tends to make him aware of his own corruption.
There was a time when most Americans knew that homosexuals were not "born that way" but rather had their normal gender-identity development disturbed and redirected through early childhood experiences.
There was a time when we recognized on some level that unhealthy relationships with mothers and fathers could cause girls and boys to grow up with gender confusion – just like emotionally devastating traumatic experiences of molestation – if not dealt with properly.
But that was a time before much of America itself was seduced into believing there was no God, or if there was a God, He is inconsequential to the affairs of the world. It was a time when Judeo-Christian morality inspired the culture and laws of the land.
Today we've basically abandoned "old-fashioned" notions of right and wrong in favor of "consensuality," which means two people can do whatever they want, no matter how abominable, as long as they "don't hurt anybody else." The problem with that – aside from the fact that it denies the existence of God and His laws – is that in such a deluded state you have no basis for determining if you’re hurting another person or not. A pedophile justifies sex with children precisely because he doesn't believe he's hurting the child; rather he believes he's loving him!
You might wonder: Where and when will this "gay rights" public relations steamroller stop? The end game is not only to bring about the complete acceptance of homosexuality, including same-sex marriage, but also to prohibit and even criminalize public criticism of homosexuality, including the quotation of biblical passages disapproving of homosexuality.
In other words, total jamming of criticism with the force of law. This is already essentially the case in Canada and parts of Scandinavia. "Why?" you might ask. "I thought gays just wanted equal rights and to be free to do what they want in their own bedrooms." No, they've had that for years.
Their campaign will not end until Christians and other traditionalists opposing homosexuality are shut up, discredited, and utterly silenced – and all because of a little factor we've forgotten about in our cleverness, namely this: In truth, there is something wrong with homosexuality.
Simply put, it is unnatural and self-destructive – just as Western civilization has long understood it.
Homosexual activists fancy their cause as identical to that of blacks and the '60s civil rights movement. But being black is not unnatural and self-destructive. Being of African origin obviously doesn't involve fleeing one's own conscience and the author of that conscience – God.
But it is precisely because of this difference that the "gay civil rights" movement is not about changing the laws so homosexuals can have equal opportunity for advancement or access as it was for blacks during the '60s. Homosexuals already live in freedom and can reside, work, or play virtually anywhere they want. In fact, as a group, homosexuals enjoy a higher income level than the general American population.
It's not about rights. It's about redefining truth and censoring all criticism so that militant homosexuals can be comfortable in their "lifestyle" without having to be disturbed by reality.
Remember, all of us – homosexuals included – have a conscience (that other-dimensional standard that God has tucked away inside each of us) that causes us inner conflict when we're doing the wrong thing.
But if we tumble into the grip of dark forces we don't understand and then start to defend our obsessions and compulsions, we inevitably come to regard our conscience as an enemy. And although we may be somewhat successful in drowning out that inner warning bell, what happens when this same rejected conscience factor appears in another person and gets too close to us for comfort? We feel threatened.
Therefore, we feel compelled to silence the "voice of conscience" – not just the one inside of us, but the one in other people, which tends to revive our own conscience with which we're at war. This means we can't tolerate dissent. We simply can't stand it. It makes us want to scream.
To the homosexual living in denial, then, even a loving offer of help from, say, a Christian ex-gay ministry or "reparative therapy" counselor (to help overcome homosexual addiction) feels like the most vile, abusive hatred. In fact, it's real love – which we misinterpret as hatred and "bigotry" simply because it causes us to confront a truth that is not welcome in us.
Love and redemption
When all is said and done, the "mainstreaming" of homosexuality over the last few decades has been a great tragedy. But of all the societal confusion, chaos, and corruption it has ushered in, the most tragic dimension of all is what it has done to people struggling with homosexual and "transgender" attractions and compulsions.
Remember, our conflicts contain the seeds of redemption – that is, as long as we know we have a problem, there’s hope for a change. But if we deny there's a problem, we are literally robbed of the chance to find healing. That's exactly what America has done in buying into the "gay rights movement." We have betrayed our homosexual brothers and sisters.
Glorifying dysfunctionality and corruption, we have relieved homosexuals of the inner conflict they once felt over their condition – something they desperately need, indeed all of us need, if we're ever going to overcome our problems and find wholeness.
A generation ago, we understood there is such a thing as sin, and that sin is a serious matter and to be avoided. Now there is no societal consciousness of sin – only limitless "freedom," "choice," and "consensual relationships." Beguiled by our scientific and technological advances into believing we are enlightened, in reality as we move further and further away from our Judeo-Christian spiritual roots, we actually understand less and less about ourselves. Most of all, we've forgotten as a society what love is because supporting and justifying homosexuality is not real love any more than glorifying drinking helps the alcoholic or celebrating smoking helps wipe out lung cancer.
We defend our own corruption at great peril. And if defending that corruption becomes a national movement, as it has with our cultural and legal adoption of the "gay rights agenda," we're all in serious trouble.
In truth, most homosexuals experience guilt and conflict when they first discover homosexual urges. Thus there is a strong temptation – especially in today's pro-"gay" culture – for them to "resolve" the conflict by giving in to the compulsion and affirming, "It's okay to be gay."
But if they do, there is just no way out for them. For this reason, the most loving stance for others to take is not to serve as enablers of self-destructive and immoral compulsions, but to stand in patient but firm opposition. In other words, we need to side with the afflicted person's conscience. In America, we've done the opposite.
"“Hating the sin but not the sinner," the classic Christian expression for loving your struggling neighbor by nonjudgmentally disagreeing with his errant behavior, actually has great power – more than we realize. By resisting the temptation to hate, yet still standing firm against what's wrong, God's love is able to come through that obedient "neutral zone."
We started this journey into the world of "gay rights" with the poignant words of former congressman Robert Bauman, who said: "I did not choose to be homosexual. I would change my sexual orientation if that were within my power." Sadly, we've failed Bauman and millions suffering with similar sexual problems by glorifying and pandering to their dysfunction and pretending it's normal.
In the end, we have to ask ourselves which is worse – the previous era in America, when homosexuals were reviled and driven underground? Or today's America, when the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that those in the grip of powerful self-destructive compulsions are fawned over and lionized as heroes?
Either way, because the rest of us have failed to find real love, they remain victims.
The preceding was reprinted with permission from "The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom." by David Kupelian, Chapter 1, "Marketing Blitz: Selling 'Gay Rights' to America," published 2005 by WND Books.
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David Kupelian is vice president and managing editor of WorldNetDaily.com and Whistleblower magazine, and author of "The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom.