By Allan Turner
This article was written while preaching in Louisville, KY more than a few years ago. It documents the gay rights activists (GRA)that has become so prevalent today, showing the process of how we got to where we are today. The warning sign shown above represents the GRA's effort to mark "homophobia," as they call it, a dangerous thing.
Over the past one hundred years, homosexuality has traveled the road from criminality, immorality, illness, and, finally, to an “alternate life-style.” The real breakthrough for homosexuals in this century can be traced back thirty or so years to Great Britain's legalization of private consensual homosexuality. Although homosexuals would have to admit that this was certainly a triumph for tolerance, mere tolerance is not enough for them. Tolerance still implies deviance; therefore, the aim of homosexuals in recent years has been to go beyond tolerance to legitimacy. Our current situation, of course, testifies to just how successful they have been.
Political militancy on behalf of homosexuals in this country can be traced to three days of confrontation in June of 1969 between the police and homosexuals in New York's Greenwich Village. The confrontation started when the police raided a “gay bar” called the Stonewall Inn. Now the so-called Stonewall Riots are commemorated each year by what has come to be identified as “Gay Pride Week” or “Gay Pride Month,” raucously celebrated in most of our major cities with parades and demonstrations.
To the politically militant homosexuals, and their supporters in the liberal media, homosexual behavior is not a perversion; it is, instead, a constitutional issue, i.e., a matter of basic human and civil rights. They have been encouraged and supported in their brashness by America's Intelligentsia, who have said: “In areas of sexuality, we believe that intolerant attitudes, often cultivated by orthodox religions and puritanical cultures, unduly repress sexual conduct. While we do not approve of exploitative, denigrating froms of sexual expression, neither do we wish to prohibit, by law or social sanction, sexual behavior between consenting adults. The many varieties of sexual exploration should not in themselves be considered `evil.' Short of harming others or compelling them to do likewise, individuals should be permitted to express their sexual proclivities and pursue their life-styles as they desire” (Humanist Manifesto II).
Furthermore, both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association have championed the cause of homosexuality by passing resolutions favorable to homosexuals. Back in 1975, the American Psychological Association released a statement which said: “The governing body of the American Psychological Association today voted to oppose discrimination against homosexuals and to support the recent action by the American Psychiatric Association, which moved homosexuality from the Association's official list of mental disorders.” It went on to say: “Homosexuality per se implies no impairment of judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities. Further, the American Psychological Association urges all mental health professionals to take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness that has long been associated with homosexual orientations” (News release of the American Psychological Association, January 24, 1975). This, of course, is not a scientific statement; it is, instead, a political statement that is totally speculative and opinionated.
Politically militant homosexuals (they call themselves “gay rights activists” [GRA]) are highly mobilized in our society. According to the current GRA's propaganda machine, anyone with an aversion to homosexuality is “abnormal.” We ought not to be surprised that back in the 1970s, the first item on the research agenda of the Task Force on the Status of Lesbian and Gay Male Psychologists of the American Psychological Association was the “Nature and Meaning of Homophobia” (“Removing the Stigma,” Final Report of the Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology's Task Force on the Status of Lesbian and Gay Male Psychologists, American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., 1979). This newly coined word, always used in a negative sense, constitutes the counterpart of “gay.” All that has been said positively about “gay” is repeated in a negative way about “homophobia.” If being “gay” is the condition of accepting and affirming joyfully the fact that one is a homosexual, “homophobia” means rejecting such a condition. To those who promote the value of homosexuality, “homophobia” is a most loathsome malady which must be cured. Incidentally, when they speak of “homophobia” in social terms as a form of discrimination, it is something to be eliminated from society; and when they speak of it in religious terms as a sin, it is something that must be repented of.
According to the GRA propaganda machine, a symptom of the illness, social disorder, or sin of “homophobia” is a strong revulsion to homosexual activities as they are being displayed in public areas and parks, where citizens complain of acts of sodomy being performed by naked men both at night and in broad-open daylight. You know you have this disorder when you go into a public rest room and are repelled to see homosexual acts being engaged in while others watch. You know you are a “homophobe” if you are afraid for your small boy to use the public rest rooms because the urinals and toilets are frequented by loitering homosexuals. That these kinds of activities actually occur is substantiated by the Dallas Police Department's Vice Control Division, which has reported fifteen to twenty arrests in just a one hour period on numerous occasions at the city's Northpark. In cities where the police still try to enforce the law against sodomy, the Dallas Police statistics are not unusual. Much to our dismay, a couple of years ago here in Louisville one of these homosexual toilet loiterers was discovered to be none other than a gospel preacher. If such disgusts you, then you can be sure that you are a “homophobe,” who, according to the defenders of homosexuality, needs to get cured, be socialized, or repent, as the case may be.
The GRA and those who support them are making an all-out bid to completely reverse the moral and religious considerations that have made homosexuality the ugly sin it really is. According to the GRA propaganda machine, all moral and religious considerations in the gay rights issue must be “discredited,” and must be identified as “perpetrating social injustices against homosexuals” (Homosexuality and Social Justice," SIECUS Report, Vol. XI, No. 3 [January 1983], pp. 1-4).
One of the most absurd efforts ever made to “discredit” the religious considerations concerning homosexuality was expounded by John Boswell in his much extolled Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. In addressing himself to the obvious Biblical condemnation of homosexuality found in Romans, Chapter One, Boswell unashamedly wrote: “...The persons whom Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual: what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons. The whole point of Romans 1, in fact, is to stigmatize persons who have rejected their calling, and gotten off the true path they were once on. It would completely undermine the thrust of the argument if the persons in question were not “naturally” inclined to the opposite sex in the same way they were naturally inclined to monotheism... It is not clear that Paul distinguished in his thoughts or writings between gay persons (in the sense of permanent sexual preference) and heterosexuals who simply engaged in periodic homosexual behavior... Paul did not discuss gay persons but only homosexual acts committed by heterosexual persons” (p. 109).
According to the homosexual agenda, Christianity, “by its moral teaching on the intrinsic evil of homosexuality,...is a conspirator in the violence perpetrated against gay men and lesbian women who are senselessly discriminated against within the public sector” (Report of the Task Force on Gay/Lesbian Issues, Commission of Social Justice, Archdiocese of San Francisco, October 24, 1979). Currently, every effort is being made by the GRA to destroy not just the morals we have traditionally believed in, but the very religion we practice.