My new favorite thing to do while at work is to visit Matt Barber’s Barbwire site and try to decide which of the day’s articles is the most insane. It’s hard to decide sometimes. I don’t know if the format, where all the most extreme wingnut writers in America are given space to write together, lends itself to an unspoken competition between them to try to out-crazy each other, or whether it’s just that they’re all soaking in the marinade together and losing a little more of their grasps on reality every day. Regardless, they need to get out more.
In two articles, published yesterday and today, two of America’s strangest anti-gay activists are arguing, respectively, that gays are Nazis, and that gays are jackbooted Stalinists, to which I reply, “Gentlemen, you must come to an agreement!”
The first piece is written by Michael Brown, and is illustrated with this image, which, I kid you not, is called “gayhammersickle.jpg”:
So obviously, Michael Brown will be arguing the “gays are jackbooted Stalinists” side:
After the forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, the influential gay blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote, “The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out.”
Not long after, the ultra-liberal Bill Maher said on “Real Time,” “I think there is a gay mafia. I think if you cross them, you do get whacked.”
This echoes comments made years earlier by lesbian journalist and author Camille Paglia in her book Vamps and Tramps: “One reason I so dislike recent gay activism,” she wrote, “is that my self-identification as a lesbian preceded Stonewall: I was the only openly gay person at the Yale Graduate School (1968-72), a candor that was professionally costly. That anyone with my aggressive and scandalous history could be called ‘homophobic,’ as has repeatedly been done, shows just how insanely Stalinist gay activism has become.”
Stalinist? Was she overstating her case?
Well, it’s Paglia, so it’s likely to be hyperbolic and reductive.
In my 2011 book A Queer Thing Happened to America, I noted that, “It would appear, then, that ‘civil rights’ for some means ‘limited rights’ for others, and that by specific design. As stated explicitly in a teacher’s lesson aid published by the Gay and Lesbian Educators [GALE] of British Columbia: ‘We must dishonour the prevailing belief that heterosexuality is the only acceptable orientation even though that would mean dishonouring the religious beliefs of Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc.’”
In that same book, I explained what was already here and what was on the immediate horizon, including this:
- From here on, embracing diversity refers to embracing all kinds of sexual orientation, (homo)sexual expression, and gender identification but rejects every kind of religious or moral conviction that does not embrace these orientations, expressions, and identifications.
- From here on, tolerance refers to the complete acceptance of LGBT lifestyles and ideology – in the family, in the work place, in education, in media, in religion – while at the same time refusing to tolerate any view that is contrary.
- From here on, inclusion refers to working with, supporting, sponsoring, and encouraging gay events, gay goals while at the same time systematically refusing to work with and excluding anyone who is not in harmony with these events and goals.
- From here on, hate refers to any attitude, thought, or word that differs with the gay agenda, while gays are virtually exempt from the charge of hate speech – no matter how vile and incendiary the rhetoric – since they are always the (perceived) victims and never the victimizers.
What exactly would this look like? Again, here is what I wrote in 2011:
- Children in elementary schools will be exposed to the rightness and complete normality of homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender expression … and opposing views will be branded as dangerous and homophobic, to be silenced and excluded from the classroom.
- Middle schools, high schools, and colleges will go out of their way to encourage both the celebration of homosexuality and deep solidarity with gay activism.
- The federal and state governments will legalize same-sex marriages … meaning that all heterosexuals must accept the legality of these marriages and that anyone refusing to do so could be prosecuted for discriminatory behavior.
- Corporate America will embrace every aspect of non-heterosexuality (including bisexuality, transgender, and beyond) – calling for the dismissal of those who refuse to follow suit – and religious groups will no longer be allowed to view homosexual practice as immoral, branding such opposition as “hate speech.”
He goes on to explain that he wrote all this before Brendan Eich resigned from Mozilla, before Disney made the decision not to fund discrimination in the Boy Scouts, before the DOMA decision, before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed, blah blah blah, something about cake bakers thinking that baking cakes is an integral part of the practice of their faith. In the real world, of course, it’s simply become socially unacceptable to be anti-gay, and those who are clinging to their bigotry are sometimes losing business because of it. Moreover, anti-gay bigots are losing court cases all over the country, not because there’s some pogrom against fundamentalists, but because they have extremely poor arguments that don’t hold up in court. But in Michael Brown’s limited world, this is evidence of creeping Stalinism at the hands of LGBT people. He also thinks that the “gay revolution” is destined to fail, but won’t tell us about why until the next column.
Arguing the “gays are Nazis” side is (of course) Scott Lively, the author of a famously mocked and debunked piece of revisionist history called The Pink Swastika, which argues that the Third Reich was, at heart, an ultra-macho homosexual movement comprised of gay men who were so masculine that they became monsters. It’s, of course, complete BS, and says more about Lively’s own deep, personal issues than it says about actual history. But Scott is excited, because he’s about to release a new edition of The Pink Swastika, sure to include pages upon pages of new made-up “evidence” for Scott’s belief that gays are Nazis.
Scott’s piece is illustrated with this picture:
Uh huh. Go on, Scott:
I once asked a journalist, who was doing a story about my listing as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to ask SPLC what I would take for them to de-list me. SPLC replied to him that I would have to recant my book, The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (co-authored with Orthodox Jewish researcher Kevin E. Abrams). I will never recant The Pink Swastika because it is the truth, so I guess I’m a SPLC “lifer.”
If you’ve never read it, here is the SPLC’s takedown of The Pink Swastika. Back to Scott’s piece:
The SPLC knows that the most dangerous aspect of my 25-year Christian ministry to stop the LGBT political agenda is the truth contained in the pages of this book. That militant agenda rests on a foundation of sand: i.e. the premise that homosexuals are victims of society who can only escape persecution and eventual extermination by expunging all disapproval of their sexual perversion from public life. The bottom-most layer of that foundation is the claim that homosexuals were victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
In 1995 Kevin and I published the first edition of The Pink Swastika to counter historical revisionism by the homosexual political movement, which had been attempting since the 1970s to fabricate a “Gay Holocaust” equivalent to that suffered by the Jews in Nazi Germany. In those days the primary symbol of the homosexual movement was the inverted pink triangle, which designated homosexuals in Nazi work camps.
Some homosexual political factions in existence in the early 90s still use the pink triangle on a limited basis, but publication of The Pink Swastika succeeded in stopping that movement-wide campaign, indirectly forcing the “gays” to abandon the pink triangle as the primary symbol of their movement. (They switched to the rainbow.) They didn’t dare to continue using the pink triangle because it would have drawn attention to the damning truth we had published in The Pink Swastika.
Oh, like hell gays “abandoned” the pink triangle because of Scott freaking Lively. Whatever deep issues lead people to become anti-gay activists must correlate deeply with grotesque delusions of grandeur. What’s more, we highlight the craziness of Scott’s book all the time. It’s not something we’re running from, because every real historian who’s ever looked at it has judged it to be complete hogwash.
Yes, some effeminate homosexual men aligned with the German Communist Party were in fact persecuted by the masculine/macho homosexual men of the fascist Nazi Party, but it was a relatively small number and they were never targeted for extermination like the Jews. The far bigger story is the widespread homosexuality among the perpetrators.
Super macho gays = Nazis. More effeminate gays = Communists. Got it.
Solely for making this assertion — and proving it with 400 pages of documentation on the centrality of homosexuality to the Nazi movement — the SPLC has also labeled me a “Holocaust Revisionist,” a nasty lie which is close to the top of the list of “100 Reasons to Hate Scott Lively” that is today posted on the refrigerators of every leftist journalist and political activist on the planet (a slight exaggeration, perhaps).
What was I just saying about delusions of grandeur?
Kevin and I are now working on the fifth edition of The Pink Swastika, a slow process, because, believe it or not, there is still such an enormous volume of additional material that our researchers have uncovered. I am methodically working (in my spare time) through a three-foot stack of photocopied pages from at least 200 new sources. The fifth edition may be over 500 pages long by the time we get finished with it.
Importantly, and alarmingly, The Pink Swastika’s claims linking homosexuality with fascism are also being proven by the emergence of a form of homo-fascism in our own society. The forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich is the latest example, but there are many in recent years. “Gay” bullies have become the new Brownshirts (just as they were the original Brownshirts).
Mark my words, these Pinkshirts will eventually grow as violent as the Brownshirts were. We got a taste of it when Floyd Lee Corkins attempted to commit mass murder at the Family Research Council, following the inspiration of none other than the SPLC. The window-smashing lesbian riot against Ryan Sorba at Smith College a few years ago comes close. My own favorite was the time I received the “Truth Teller Award” from Peter LaBarbera’s Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH). Early on the morning of the event LGBT activists smashed out the windows at our host church in Arlington Heights, Illinois with a paving stone scrawled with the demand “SHUT DOWN LIVELY,” accompanied by threats of more violence posted on the Internet by the perpetrators.
At the time of the AFTAH incident I noted that in posting an admission of responsibility and threat of future violence a la Al Qaeda, the “gays” had crossed an invisible line from intimidation into terrorism.
He sounds so terrified. I do not understand what happened in Scott Lively’s life that made him so irrationally afraid of gay people, but it’s something that needs to be worked out with a therapist. The Corkins incident was the work of a deranged person, and was roundly condemned by all gay organizations. The Sorba incident was indeed obnoxious, but Sorba is the type of “look at me!” activist who goes looking for those sorts of confrontations. And of course, the brick throwing incident was most likely a hoax.
No matter, though. In Scott Lively’s fevered, terrified mind, this means that gays are Nazis. And also al-Qaeda. We are so many scary things. Who will be the first anti-gay activist to call us the Big Bad Wolf?
What happens next? If history repeats, the answer to that question lies in the pages of The Pink Swastika, which you may read in the fourth edition in its entirety by clicking here. Both of these are free to read and disseminate without charge, and I urge you to make the maximum use of them while it is still possible to do so. God willing we will release the fourth chapter of the fifth edition by the end of April. Stay tuned
In closing, to show that there truly is “nothing new under the sun” regarding the homosexual agenda I will quote Hans von Tresckow from his memoirs of his service as Police Commissioner of Berlin in the late 1800s and early 1900s:
“[I]t is not the sense of duty towards one’s fellow men or the nation that forms the rule of conduct for homosexualists; but in every turn of life and in all their striving they think only of the good or harm they may do to their own clique of friends.”
History never repeats identically, there are always variations colored by culture of the day. The cultural color of Nazi Germany was brown, but in millennial America pink is the new brown.
Goodness. So that is the end of his argument. I do wonder if these men are aware that the Nazis and the Stalinists were on different sides of the war. Or perhaps that doesn’t matter at all, because the shrinking audience for the messages these men are disseminating is fairly historically illiterate, and all they know about “Nazis” and “Stalinists” is that they’re scary and bad. It’s the same as the right wingers who call President Obama a “Marxist” or a “Communist.” People can debate President Obama’s policies all day long, but there is nothing about him that is either Marxist or Communist, at least not when you respect that words have definitions. But the ones who hate him the most also know that “Marxist” and “Communist” are scary things that they probably couldn’t explain if you paid them.
But really, both of those articles, with both of those pictures, are on the front page of Barbwire right now. Perhaps the site’s editor or Matt Barber himself could be so kind as to come in and decide once and for all whether we’re Nazis or Stalinists or Marxists or al Qaeda or Sith Lords or the Sharks or the Jets, or Jafar from Aladdin. Or perhaps they could have the integrity for the first time in their professional careers to admit that they’re just sticking whatever label on us they think sounds the scariest at any given moment.
