Homosexual agenda (or gay agenda) is a term used by some conservatives in the United States to describe the advocacy of cultural acceptance and normalization of non-heterosexual orientations and relationships.[1][2][3] The term is applied to efforts to change government policies and laws on LGBT issues (e.g., same-sex marriage, LGBT adoption, recognizing sexual orientation as a civil rights minority classification, LGBT military participation, inclusion of LGBT history and themes in public education), as well as non-governmental campaigns and individual actions that increase visibility and cultural acceptance of LGBT people, relationships, and identities.[2] The term has also been used by social conservatives to describe supposed goals of LGBT rights activists for which they themselves have never advocated, such as "recruiting" heterosexuals into "the homosexual lifestyle".
Contents |
In the US, the term "the gay agenda" was first used in public discourse in 1992 when the Family Research Council, an American conservative Christian group,[4] released a video series called The Gay Agenda as part of a pack of materials campaigning on homosexual issues and the "hidden gay agenda".[5] In the same year the Oregon Citizens Alliance used this video as part of their campaign for Ballot Measure 9 to amend the Oregon Constitution to prevent what the OCA called special rights for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.[6] Paul Cameron — co-founder of the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality in Lincoln, later renamed the Family Research Institute — appeared in the video, wherein he asserted that 75 percent of gay men regularly ingest feces and that 70-78 percent have had a sexually transmitted disease.[7] The Gay Agenda was followed by three other video publications; The Gay Agenda in Public Education (1993), The Gay Agenda: March on Washington (1993) and a feature follow-up Stonewall: 25 Years of Deception (1994). The videos contained interviews with opponents of LGBT rights, and the series was made available through Christian right organizations.[8]
The idea of a homosexual agenda is also used by some Christian critics of LGBT rights in conjunction with a putative ideology they refer to as homosexualism (as opposed to a synonym for homosexuality), using homosexualists to describe people who seek to advance LGBT emancipation.[9][10] The use of homosexualist in this way first appeared in 1995 in Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams' book The Pink Swastika, "to refer to any person, homosexual or not, who actively promotes homosexuality as morally and socially equivalent to heterosexuality as a basis for social policy".[11] Lively and Abrahams in The Pink Swastika argue that alleged homosexuality found in the Nazi Party, specifically within Ernst Rohm's SA, contributed to the extreme militarism of Nazi Germany, and write about the gay agenda in this context.
In 2003 Alan Sears and Craig Osten, president and vice-president of the Alliance Defense Fund, an American conservative Christian organization, offered another characterization:
It is an agenda that they basically set in the late 1980s, in a book called After the Ball,[12] where they laid out a six-point plan for how they could transform the beliefs of ordinary Americans with regard to homosexual behavior — in a decade-long time frame.... They admit it privately, but they will not say that publicly. In their private publications, homosexual activists make it very clear that there is an agenda. The six-point agenda that they laid out in 1989 was explicit:
- Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible(...)
- Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers(...)
- Give homosexual protectors a just cause(...)
- Make gays look good(...)
- Make the victimizers look bad(...)
- Get funds from corporate America(...)[1]
After the Ball[12] is a book published in 1989 by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. It argues that after the gay liberation phase of the 1970s and 1980s, gay rights groups should adopt more professional public relations techniques to convey their message. It was published by Doubleday and was generally available.
According to a Christian Broadcasting Network article by Paul Strand, Sears and Osten argue that After the Ball follows from "a 1988 summit of gay leaders in Warrenton, Virginia, who came together to agree on the agenda" and that
the two men (Kirk and Madsen) proposed using tactics on 'straight' America that are remarkably similar to the brainwashing methods of Mao Tse-Tung's Communist Chinese – mixed with Madison Avenue's most persuasive selling techniques.[13]
The article goes on to claim that films such as Brokeback Mountain are part of this "well-planned propaganda campaign".
| “ | Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct."[14] | ” |
| “ | Those goals include universal acceptance of the gay lifestyle, discrediting of scriptures that condemn homosexuality, muzzling of the clergy and Christian media, granting of special privileges and rights in the law, overturning laws prohibiting pedophilia, indoctrinating children and future generations through public education, and securing all the legal benefits of marriage for any two or more people who claim to have homosexual tendencies."[16] | ” |
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) describes the term as a "rhetorical invention of anti-gay extremists seeking to create a climate of fear by portraying the pursuit of civil rights for LGBT people as sinister",[3] and commentators have remarked on a lack of realism and veracity to the idea of a gay agenda per se.[18][19] Such campaigns based on a presumed "Gay Agenda" have been described as anti-gay propaganda by researchers and critics.[20][21]
A satirical article by Michael Swift which appeared in the Gay Community News in February 1987 entitled "Gay Revolutionary" describes a scenario in which homosexual men dominate American society and suppress all things heterosexual. This was reprinted in Congressional Record without the opening disclaimer which made it clearer that the article's text was not intended to be taken literally.[22]
The term is sometimes used satirically as a counterfoil by people who would normally find this term offensive, such as the spoof agenda found on the Betty Bowers satirical website,[23] and when Bishop Gene Robinson declared that "Jesus is the agenda, the homosexual agenda in the Episcopal Church".[24][25] On an episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart defined the gay agenda as "gay marriage, civil rights protection, Fleet Week expanded to Fleet Year, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assistance for when it's raining men, Kathy Griffin to host everything and a nationwide ban on pleated pants."[26]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||