Commentary : Acceptance of Homosexuals as ‘Minorities’ Is Common--but Wrong

The proliferation of “gay pride” days across the country--replete with parades, festivals and smiling public officials--confirms the increasing power and political sophistication of a movement that had, until quite recently, “dared not speak its name.”

Here in Orange County, homosexual political activism is on an upswing.

After the Board of Supervisors voted down an unnecessary AIDS discrimination ordinance, which would have afforded special status to a behavior-based group, homosexuals, militant board members of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center of Orange County, which receives your tax dollars to encourage and support homosexuality, participated in a “die in” to accuse the supervisors of being responsible for deaths of AIDS victims.

The incriminating evidence is that the Board of Supervisors would not grant legitimacy to sodomy. Many of these same individuals have disrupted local town hall meetings, instigated what KCBS reported as a “near riot” at Santa Ana City Council meetings and participated in boisterous pickets, usually shouting down an opposing view.

What has caused such a transformation in public acceptance? Traditional liberals, like Thomas Jefferson, regarded homosexual acts as a form of “buggery,” not unlike bestiality (but worse than bestiality because he thought it was more “injurious” to society); modern-day liberals arrange mayoral proclamations, set aside public parks and politically bless acts historically regarded as a self-destructive perversion. Why?

The secret lies in an event “gay pride” days celebrate: the Stonewall Riot in Greenwich Village in June, 1969. When homosexuals resisted a police raid on the Stonewall Bar with rocks and epithets, it sparked more than a short-lived riot in the Village. The demonstration became a movement. The “movement” came from a powerful political locomotive: the language of civil rights.

By positioning themselves as a minority, homosexuals skillfully used the rhetoric of civil rights (“discrimination”) and the widespread public legitimacy of the civil rights movement to advance their political agenda.

As a reverend who endeavored to advance the civil rights movement in conservative areas of North Dakota and Delaware in different Presbyterian churches that I served, I have found it increasingly curious that many people uncritically, indeed reflexively, accept this comparison of homosexuals to minorities. To equate a status fixed by genetics (sex, race) or historical accident (national origin) with a behavior-based status (a group linked by a common preference, say, to commit sodomy) requires serious analysis.

The impact of homosexual behavior on contemporary culture is increasingly clear. This byproduct of the sexual revolution has spawned enormous public health problems. The median male homosexual, the Centers of Disease Control discovered in the early days of AIDS, has had more than 500 sex partners. A small slice of the population (perhaps as small as 1.4%, based on recent statistical profiles from major cities and surveys by the National Institute of Mental Health) is responsible for the majority of syphilis cases in the country. Anal sodomy has been the principal means of transmission of the most enormous pandemic this country has ever seen, and one which the Wall Street Journal estimates will cost $60 billion next year alone.

Homosexual practices are so unwholesome that they generate staggeringly disproportionate cases of hepatitis A, hepatitis B, venereal disease, parasite infections and other exotic ailments to such an alarming degree that one doctor in the New York Times Magazine has called the average homosexual “a tropical island of exotic diseases.”

The only answer is the mesmerizing impact of a misplaced analogy. The person who finds sexual expression in sodomy (or, for that matter, in incest, adultery, bestiality or sadomasochism) can define himself as a member of a particular “minority” who shares that behavior. But it makes no sense for him to claim the same social protections of those who are born black, female or in a foreign country.

A popular celebration of one of the most dangerous behaviors in modern life is hardly a constitutional imperative or sound public policy. Nor is it compassionate to those who (despite the growing number of the groups like Homosexuals Anonymous and the treatment success of both traditional psychiatrists and religious groups) continue to do damage to themselves or others by leading unnatural and destructive life styles.

Could it be that the Old and New Testaments, Plato in his “Laws,” the great majority of major religious tradition of the world and Thomas Jefferson had it right--and modern political trends have it wrong?