Gay Pride Month: Communists stand in solidarity

The following statement was issued June 21 by the Communist Party USA and Young Communist League in honor of Pride Month.

The month of June has been designated as Pride Month in celebration of the struggles and achievements of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the United States. This coming weekend marks the anniversary of the uprising that occurred at the Stonewall Inn on June 27, 1969, in New York City. The uprising, in response to bar raids and attacks by the police, was led by working-class gay and transgender people, many of whom were Black or Latino, and became a rallying point for LGBT people in the United States and around the world.

Every year since, LGBT people and their allies have been holding parades and rallies to highlight the discrimination that LGBT people face and to struggle forward for equality and liberation.

In 2006, we still have a long ways to go. This year marks the 25th year of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Today, millions of people are still denied access to life-saving drugs and medical help because of profit-driven drug corporations. In our schools, the ultra-right and religious conservatives deny students access to scientifically accurate sex education while more young people are becoming infected with HIV every year.

In our schools, in our workplaces and in our streets, LGBT people are faced with discrimination, hatred and violence.

Last week Kevin Aviance, a famous gay performer, was attacked and beaten in what is considered a “gay friendly” area in NYC. In Moscow, 50 LGBT people were arrested for attempting to hold the city’s first-ever Gay Pride Parade. In Australia, the president overturned a law that would allow same-sex marriage and the conservative government now in power in Canada is also seeking to overturn its law that allows gay marriage.

Here at home, Bush and the ultra-right continue to push the anti-gay button in order to drum up support in the 2006 elections. Just as in 2004, Bush is using gay marriage as a rallying cry for his conservative base that has started to turn against him because of his disastrous handling of the Iraq war and domestic issues.

We at the Communist Party USA and the Young Communist League USA stand in solidarity with our LGBT brothers and sisters in the fight for full equality. We demand an end to the violence and discrimination against LGBT people in our schools, workplaces and communities. We will be marching, rallying and celebrating this weekend in Pride Parades across the country and invite all readers of the People’s Weekly World to join us in the struggle for LGBT equality.

Homosexuality and the Nazi Party
by Scott Lively

Scott Lively is co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuals and the Nazi Party (Keizer, Oregon: Founders Publishing Company, 1995).

"By the time the Nazis came to power, "Bible-believing" Christians, (the Confessing Church) were a small minority. As Grunberger asserts, Nazism itself was a "pseudo-religion" (ibid.:79) that competed, in a sense, with Christianity and Judaism.

The schools were heavily targeted in order to de-Christianize the young. Mandatory prayer in schools was stopped in 1935, and from 1941 onward, religious instruction was completely eliminated for all students over 14 years old (ibid.:494f). The Nazi Teachers Association actively discouraged its members from taking religious instruction, while at the same time many teachers of religious studies (who were all required to be licensed by the state) "inculcated neo-paganism into their pupils during periods of religious instruction." Later, teachers were outright prohibited from attending voluntary religion classes organized by the Catholic church (ibid.:495).

From the early years, leading Nazis openly attacked Christianity. Joseph Goebbels declared that "Christianity has infused our erotic attitudes with dishonesty" (Taylor:20). It is in this campaign against Judeo- Christian morality that we find the reason for the German people's acceptance of Nazism's most extreme atrocities. Their religious foundations had been systematically eroded over a period of decades by powerful social forces. By the time the Nazis came to power, German culture was spiritually bankrupt. Too often, historians have largely ignored the spiritual element of Nazi history; but if we look closely at Hitler's campaign of extermination of the Jews, it becomes clear that his ostensive racial motive obscures a deeper and more primal hatred of the Jews as the "People of God."

The probable reason for Hitler's attack on Christianity was his perception that it alone had the moral authority to stop the Nazi movement. But Christians stumbled before the flood of evil. As Poliakov notes, "[W]hen moral barriers collapsed under the impact of Nazi preaching...the same anti-Semitic movement that led to the slaughter of the Jews gave scope and license to an obscene revolt against God and the moral law. An open and implacable war was declared on the Christian tradition...[which unleashed] a frenzied and unavowed hatred of Christ and the Ten Commandments" (Poliakov:300). "

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