That Old Devil Agenda (reposted)

Apologies to my dear Readers: no new post today. But because I promised to give you updates regarding yesterday's post, I will repost this one from August 19, 2013, which deals with a similarly unfortunate topic: the anti-gay agenda.... Thanks for understanding, and stay tuned!


 
It’s an old tune, a very old tune, perhaps a hymn tune. And the host of Focal Point crooned it very well: we must choose, America, between freedom and the homosexual agenda. And Scott Lively agreed—he notes that Hutchinson, Kansas, a town he deems “sleepy,” is considering adopting an antidiscrimination law for gay people. And that’s the thin edge of the wedge, the first step down the slippery slope. It started off in the 80’s with San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin (yup, my hometown) and look what’s become of them!

I listened, dear Reader, because I wanted to know—how virulent is this man, who decided to run down to Uganda and tell politicians and cops and preachers the “truth” about the homosexual agenda? As you may remember, things got a little outta hand, and the Ugandans came up with a bill so draconian that the world had to face them down. There was that provision of death for “aggravated homosexuality.” In fact, even Lively himself was upset. As stated in the Wikipedia article on him, he wrote:

[M]y advice to the parliament was to go the other direction from what they did to actually go on a proactive positive message promoting the family, promoting marriage, etcetera, through the schools, and that if they were going to continue to criminalize homosexuality that they should focus on rehabilitation and not punishment. And I was very disappointed when the law came out as it is written now with such incredibly harsh punishments.

So how virulent was he? My initial reaction was, “not so bad,” but that may in fact make him more dangerous. He presents himself as a scholar—no one, he says, knows more about this topic than he. He poses as unbiased; some homosexuals, he asserts, don’t molest children, but many do. He distorts history; the very basis of homosexuality has traditionally been between an adult male and a youth or teenage boy.

He has a flip chart, on which he displays the varying types of homosexuals; in the case of women, there are the butches and the fems, occupying the middle of the line graph. In the case of men, there is the super effeminate male on the right. And on the left, one step past “super-macho?”

Monster.

Yes, these are they hyper masculine, no mercy homosexuals that were the secret power within the Third Reich. These were the homosexuals that killed the Jews, that released the gas.

History is a smorgasbord for Lively—he munches on the Ancient Greek tradition of man / boy relationships, he chomps down on the morsel that there were homosexuals in the early days of Nazism, but that they were rigorously suppressed later. Oh, and that half a million gay people died in the gas chambers.

No, he says, most gay people are miserably unhappy—we are drowning ourselves in alcohol and drugs. And we therefore have to drag everybody down to our level—to our pit of despair and degradation. And how do we do that? By recruiting youths, which is called pederasty.

Nor did Lively concern himself just with Uganda. He also went on a fifty city-tour through Russia, and guess what? Provinces and districts throughout the country began passing draconian laws, essentially similar to Uganda’s law. Here’s what Masha Gessen wrote:

The first time I heard about legislation banning "homosexual propaganda", I thought it was funny. Quaint. I thought the last time anyone had used those words in earnest I had been a kid and my girlfriend hadn't been born yet. Whatever they meant when they enacted laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the small towns of Ryazan or Kostroma, it could not have anything to do with reality, me or the present day. This was a bit less than two years ago.

Hate is a virulent message, true, but does anybody think that one man alone—little Scott Lively—is capable of jumping on a plane, spending a week or two, and getting such spectacular results?

Of course not—here’s what I wrote, citing Wikipedia, on January 22 of this year:

The Fellowship, through Representative Joe Pitts (R.-Pa.), redirected millions in US aid to Uganda from sex education programs to abstinence programs, thereby causing an evangelical revival, which included condom burnings.

In a November 2009 NPR interview, Sharlet alleged that Ugandan Fellowship associates David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo were behind the recent proposed bill in Uganda that called for the death penalty for gays.[75] Bahati cited a conversation with Fellowship members in 2008 as having inspired the legislation.[76]

And who is Sharlet? The author of The Family, which details the shadowy combination of religious fundamentalism, politics, and corporations. Yes, through Doug Coe and his “family,” American tax dollars have made life hell for Ugandan and Russian LGBT folk.

And here’s where—only very slightly—I begin to feel sorry for Lively. He’s been used, and he may have to pay, as he should. Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) paired with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to haul Lively into court for hate crimes. And on Wednesday, 14 August 13, federal judge Michael Ponsor ruled that yes, the case can proceed.

Good for the judge!

So yes, it’s certainly true that someone out there has an agenda, but is it the homosexuals?

You decide.

That Old Devil Agenda....

It’s an old tune, a very old tune, perhaps a hymn tune. And the host of Focal Point crooned it very well: we must choose, America, between freedom and the homosexual agenda. And Scott Lively agreed—he notes that Hutchinson, Kansas, a town he deems “sleepy,” is considering adopting an antidiscrimination law for gay people. And that’s the thin edge of the wedge, the first step down the slippery slope. It started off in the 80’s with San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin (yup, my hometown) and look what’s become of them!

I listened, dear Reader, because I wanted to know—how virulent is this man, who decided to run down to Uganda and tell politicians and cops and preachers the “truth” about the homosexual agenda? As you may remember, things got a little outta hand, and the Ugandans came up with a bill so draconian that the world had to face them down. There was that provision of death for “aggravated homosexuality.” In fact, even Lively himself was upset. As stated in the Wikipedia article on him, he wrote:

[M]y advice to the parliament was to go the other direction from what they did to actually go on a proactive positive message promoting the family, promoting marriage, etcetera, through the schools, and that if they were going to continue to criminalize homosexuality that they should focus on rehabilitation and not punishment. And I was very disappointed when the law came out as it is written now with such incredibly harsh punishments.

So how virulent was he? My initial reaction was, “not so bad,” but that may in fact make him more dangerous. He presents himself as a scholar—no one, he says, knows more about this topic than he. He poses as unbiased; some homosexuals, he asserts, don’t molest children, but many do. He distorts history; the very basis of homosexuality has traditionally been between an adult male and a youth or teenage boy.

He has a flip chart, on which he displays the varying types of homosexuals; in the case of women, there are the butches and the fems, occupying the middle of the line graph. In the case of men, there is the super effeminate male on the right. And on the left, one step past “super-macho?”

Monster.

Yes, these are they hyper masculine, no mercy homosexuals that were the secret power within the Third Reich. These were the homosexuals that killed the Jews, that released the gas.

History is a smorgasbord for Lively—he munches on the Ancient Greek tradition of man / boy relationships, he chomps down on the morsel that there were homosexuals in the early days of Nazism, but that they were rigorously suppressed later. Oh, and that half a million gay people died in the gas chambers.

No, he says, most gay people are miserably unhappy—we are drowning ourselves in alcohol and drugs. And we therefore have to drag everybody down to our level—to our pit of despair and degradation. And how do we do that? By recruiting youths, which is called pederasty.

Nor did Lively concern himself just with Uganda. He also went on a fifty city-tour through Russia, and guess what? Provinces and districts throughout the country began passing draconian laws, essentially similar to Uganda’s law. Here’s what Masha Gessen wrote:

The first time I heard about legislation banning "homosexual propaganda", I thought it was funny. Quaint. I thought the last time anyone had used those words in earnest I had been a kid and my girlfriend hadn't been born yet. Whatever they meant when they enacted laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the small towns of Ryazan or Kostroma, it could not have anything to do with reality, me or the present day. This was a bit less than two years ago.

Hate is a virulent message, true, but does anybody think that one man alone—little Scott Lively—is capable of jumping on a plane, spending a week or two, and getting such spectacular results?

Of course not—here’s what I wrote, citing Wikipedia, on January 22 of this year:

The Fellowship, through Representative Joe Pitts (R.-Pa.), redirected millions in US aid to Uganda from sex education programs to abstinence programs, thereby causing an evangelical revival, which included condom burnings.

In a November 2009 NPR interview, Sharlet alleged that Ugandan Fellowship associates David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo were behind the recent proposed bill in Uganda that called for the death penalty for gays.[75] Bahati cited a conversation with Fellowship members in 2008 as having inspired the legislation.[76]

And who is Sharlet? The author of The Family, which details the shadowy combination of religious fundamentalism, politics, and corporations. Yes, through Doug Coe and his “family,” American tax dollars have made life hell for Ugandan and Russian LGBT folk.

And here’s where—only very slightly—I begin to feel sorry for Lively. He’s been used, and he may have to pay, as he should. Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) paired with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to haul Lively into court for hate crimes. And on Wednesday, 14 August 13, federal judge Michael Ponsor ruled that yes, the case can proceed.

Good for the judge!

So yes, it’s certainly true that someone out there has an agenda, but is it the homosexuals?

You decide.

Oh Yeah?

Readers of this blog will know about Doug Coe—the secretive force behind the National Prayer Breakfast.

Oh, and much more.

He makes no bones about it, though he doesn’t say much—really anything—publicly. He, and his group The Family (also called The Fellowship) minister exclusively to the rich and (especially) politically powerful. They form “cells” around congressmen and women, Coe can enter virtually any office and be received with hugs. Face time with the president? No problem! (At least with W.—don’t know about Obama….)

And he has a curious tendency to invoke Hitler as a supreme leader—a man with consummate rhetorical skills (can’t be denied….), a man with a gift for organization (true), and especially a man who starts with a handful of men and almost changes the world permanently (can’t dispute that). 

Now then, let’s move to Uganda.

Say what, you exclaim!

Bear with me.

There is in Uganda a transgendered man who is fighting—against horrific odds—against virulent homophobia. How virulent, you ask? Consider this:

Or this quote from Pepe Julian Onziema, the man adduced above:

I am here, still, in 2013, but I dread things as simple as shopping at a kiosk for groceries, because the owner has told me he doesn't sell to "such people." If I insist, he said, he will "teach me how to be normal." A full night's sleep is thwarted by the fear of a stranger who has followed me home or the neighbors who have formed a mob. My personal struggle is a small reflection of the entire LGBTI community's everyday apprehension.

That’s from an article in CNN entitled “Living Proudly in the Face of Uganda’s Anti-Gay Bill.” Here’s Onziema on the topic:

Since 2009, my community has faced the potential passage of an anti-homosexuality bill that threatens Ugandans in same-sex relationships with life imprisonment (there are conflicting reports on whether the original death penalty provision remain). This year, many Anglican Church officials and other leaders have declared the legislation's speedy passage as their New Year's resolutions, with the bill scheduled for discussion when Uganda's parliament reconvenes in February. As a transgender man, I am not safe.

I knew about this, of course, and signed an online petition against it. So did a lot of people. But the click of a mouse is a minor thing, a few minute muscles flexing, a little electronic blip going out into the world. The Ugandans may pass the bill. Onziema may end up as dead as his partner David Kato, with whom he founded SMUG—Sexual Minorities Uganda. This is the second anniversary of Kato’s…

…murder.

This would scare the bejesus out of me. How do you get that courage, that strength, to live with the constant fear of everything? A Cuban friend told me once a very simple definition of a free society. You’re in bed at two o’clock in the morning; you hear footsteps on the pavement outside your house. You yawn and go back to sleep.

That’s a free society.

Your body tenses, you sweat, you know you should run but are paralyzed.

Police state.

Well, the guy is still fighting, and still has hope. And one glimmer of hope is thrown lightly into a paragraph:

And I hope to win a U.S. lawsuit against American evangelist Scott Lively for the anti-gay terror he exported to my country.

Well, that rang a bell. We’re back to Doug Coe and The Fellowship, whose influence goes far and wide, into the little countries that no one knows about or cares about, or even knows where they are. But some of those places have minerals or other resources, and maybe even a little domestic strife, in which case a nice little weapons deal can be brokered with the (for now) leader who is, by the way, your brother in Christ. Oh, and want to sit at the president’s table for the National Prayer Breakfast? No problem!

And in fact, I knew that a group of Coe’s “fellows” had ventured down to Uganda, to talk about that ole devil, the gay menace!

Click, and I’m on Wikipedia reading up on Scott Lively. And it seems he is lively in several senses (you could see that on the horizon, couldn’t you?). I joke, but it’s not funny. Lively and company arrive in Kampala in 2009, and here’s his account.

"Thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians," reportedly attended the conference.[4] Lively and his colleagues "discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how 'the gay movement is an evil institution' whose goal is 'to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.'"[4] Lively wrote days later that "someone had likened their campaign to 'a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.'"[4]

Nothing like thumping the Bible to stir up a little hate! And the guy is an author too (as well, by the way, as an abuser of women—he assaulted a woman in 1991, she sued, he got stuck for 31,000 bucks)!

You can guess the topic. But the title?

The Pink Swastika.

Here’s Wikipedia again:

Along with Kevin E. Abrams, he co-authored the book The Pink Swastika, which states in the preface that "homosexuals [are] the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities."[5] Several historians have questioned the book's claims and selective use of research.[6][7][8][9][10]

“Several” historians? Is there ANY historian—who doesn’t happen to be a religious nut case—who could possibly NOT question the book’s claims?

I take a pill that reliably wakes me up in the middle of the night with a craving for food. (OK—carbohydrates…) That gives me time to look into the crannies of the Internet, the places I ordinarily wouldn’t go. So I found myself spending time last night with Ruth Maier, often deemed the Norwegian Anne Frank.

An Austrian from a cultured family (father had a doctorate in philosophy and spoke nine languages), Ruth escapes to Norway, her sister—more luckily—makes it to Britain.

The footsteps on the pavement outside, one night, became her worst fear. She was deported to Auschwitz and gassed immediately.

And yes, she left behind a diary—one critic compares her writing to Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag (wow!) And she had, it seems, a passionate affair with her soul mate—a woman called Gunvor Hofmo. They were, if my 2AM reading serves me, lovers.

Well, the Norwegian government apologized, almost exactly a year ago. Here’s more copy / paste from you-know-what….

The Holocaust came to Norway on Thursday 26 November 1942. Ruth Maier was one of the many who were arrested that day. On 26 November, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, the sound of heavy boots could be heard on the stairs of the boarding house “Englehjemmet” in Oslo. A few minutes later, the slight Jewish girl was seen by her friends being led out the door of Dalsbergstien 3. Ruth Maier was last seen being forced into a black truck by two big Norwegian policemen. Five days later the 22-year-old was dead. Murdered in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. Fortunately it is part of being human that we learn from our mistakes. And it is never too late. More than 50 years after the war ended, the Storting decided to make a settlement, collectively and individually, for the economic liquidation of Jewish assets. By so doing the state accepted moral responsibility for the crimes committed against Norwegian Jews during the Second World War. What about the crimes against Ruth Maier and the other Jews? The murders were unquestionably carried out by the Nazis. But it was Norwegians who carried out the arrests. It was Norwegians who drove the trucks. And it happened in Norway.

—Jens Stoltenberg, prime minister, 27 January 2012

There were 532 Jews deported that day.

An apology is an empty thing unless it gets backed up by something. Actually, an apology is a debt, an obligation to change, for which you will pay and struggle until the change is complete.

Half a million homosexuals were exterminated in the Holocaust. An American writes a slanderous book, piling blame on the victims. The Anglican Church of Uganda wants to rewrite and relive history.

To my knowledge, I haven’t played a part in any atrocity.

But anybody who doesn’t speak up is complicit.

I’ll borrow some words from the woman who gave me as much moral compass as I have.

“SCOTT LIVELY, GO STRAIGHT TO YOUR ROOM AND DON’T COME OUT UNTIL YOU’RE GOOD AND SORRY!”