Anti-Gay Quote Even Upsets Sheldon

The Rev. Lou Sheldon has been upsetting gays since the early 1970s, when the California Legislature first considered ending criminal penalties against sodomy, and he opposed it. Sheldon lost that fight, but it launched his Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition that still chugs along today. And in the 32 years since he first spoke to a reporter’s notebook, Sheldon, now 70, has decried homosexuality whenever asked about it.

So why is the good reverend, always near the top of the list of people gays love to bash, so upset over being quoted in a New York newspaper as saying gays are dangerous because they recruit young boys?

“Because I didn’t say it.”

Making the story even juicier is that the person quoting Sheldon is none other than Jimmy Breslin, a 1986 Pulitzer Prize winner and lion of American journalism. In a column last week, Breslin, writing for Newsday, recalled an exchange between himself and Sheldon:

“Homosexuals are dangerous,” Sheldon assured me one day. He was a short man with eyes gleaming when he mentioned how bad homosexuals truly are.

Breslin quoted Sheldon as saying, when asked how bad:

“They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual.”

Sheldon says the conversation never occurred and that he’s never met Breslin. Worse yet, he says he’d never say that about gays.

Breslin didn’t help the journalistic cause by telling the Washington Post that the exchange occurred in 1992, which he hadn’t mentioned in his column last week. He couldn’t produce the 12-year-old notes, but cited a column he’d written soon after he says he talked to Sheldon. That column, however, didn’t include any of the provocative things he used last week.

Both icons are sticking to their guns. I don’t know the truth, but find it interesting that Sheldon -- who has spent his adult life fighting the “homosexual agenda” -- gives a hoot.

“We have several members in the Congress who have been outed as homosexuals who are friends of mine,” he says. “I have several friends who are homosexuals; they don’t buy the radical agenda. The reason I responded is because I do not believe that and would never support that kind of rhetoric against the homosexual agenda. That’s not what they do. They’re ingenious. They’re not a bunch of dummies.”

Sheldon says he believes as he always has: Homosexuality is immoral and that gays can and should change their sexual preference. I ask what his gay friends say to that. “They know I have compassion and love them and want to help them, and we both wish to God this was something they could just shake off, like a bad cold.”

The remarks Breslin attributed to him in the 1992 column sound accurate, Sheldon says, reiterating that they didn’t include the proselytizing angle. Sheldon theorizes Breslin lifted those remarks from other sources; Breslin says it was a face-to-face conversation at the Republican National Convention. Sheldon says the only “recruiting” he’s ever referred to was about efforts by public schools or other groups to accept the gay lifestyle.

I ask why he devoted his life to the issue. “I cannot be disobedient to my heavenly vision,” he says. “This one thing was very clear to me. No voice, just intuitively, I knew I had to speak out on this issue.”

He fears Breslin’s column him might “polarize” people.

You don’t think you’ve been doing that for years, I ask.

“I believe I’ve only spoken what is true for people of faith. People of faith are the ones who have come alongside.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.