3/6/99
ldlockman@telplus.net
The Maine Speak Out Project (MSOP) is back in the news again, the beneficiary of a fawning media elite eager to portray Maine as a bigoted backwater of rampant "homophobia." Timing is everything in politics, and the latest gush of publicity is calibrated to coincide with legislative debate of proposed federal and state "gay-rights" statutes.
Veteran gay-rights advocate Peter Rees of Trenton is touting MSOP's soon-to-be-published Maine Safe Schools Resource Guide as a road map to the celebration of "diversity" in Maine high schools, but all the warm and fuzzy rhetoric is nothing but camouflage for the Gay Left's relentless campaign to hijack minority status under the civil-rights laws.
While Mr. Rees pays lip service to the notion that "everyone is entitled to their own thoughts and opinions," the dirty little secret of gay activism is its aggressive intolerance of dissent from the party line that gays and lesbians are an oppressed and disadvantaged minority group entitled to special treatment as "victims" of pervasive anti-gay prejudice.
Once they achieve a critical mass of support for their counterfeit claim to victimhood, gay activists move quickly to bully and browbeat anyone who dares to challenge their lust for power. College campuses are one domain in which this aggression is being carried out with such ferocity that even the most "progressive" legislators ought to pause, if even momentarily, before bowing at the altar of gay activism.Brownshirts at Bates
In the autumn of 1997, Bates College in Lewiston was the scene of a surreal ruckus over alleged "homophobia" on campus. During "National Coming Out Weekend", gay-activist students defaced campus buildings and walkways with banners, scrawlings, and symbols celebrating "gay pride." Acting on orders from the Dean of Students, Bates security officers removed the material from walkways.
Almost immediately, all hell broke loose.
According to an account in the Lewiston Sun-Journal, some students called the Dean's actions "a hate crime" while others saw the situation as part of "blatantly homophobic" policies at the school."
Aggrieved students staged a sit-in to drum up support for a "contract" to eradicate "homophobia" (there's that word again) at the school. "The sit-in was very, very powerful," said Bates junior Rachel Simons. "We had 200 people there. They were chanting to drum beats, and it was very empowering for the students and the faculty who are on our side."
The Dean of Students promptly caved in to the demands of the protesters: a fully-staffed and funded gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) studies program designed to bring about "the transformation of the campus"; college funding for speakers, presentations, and performances at National Coming Out Weekend; and mandatory "sensitivity training" for Bates students and alumni.
Remarkable, isn't it, how quickly gay activists' desire to Speak Out translates to everyone else having to Shut Up, and then being forced to pick up the tab for the activists' self-absorbed celebration of their political agenda? The Bates brownshirts apparently lack any sense of shame, or history. How else to explain their demand for mandatory sensitivity training, an ultimatum eerily reminiscent of re-education camps for dissidents not so long ago on the European continent?
The stifling atmosphere of Gay Left-inspired coercion and intimidation at Bates is typical of many college campuses across the country. These self-contained, smugly "progressive" environments offer a preview of what society can expect once "sexual orientation" is cemented into place in civil-rights law as a minority category equivalent to race and ethnicity.Hitler's "Mein Kampf" a Manual for Gay Activists
Tactics once considered radical and subversive are now accepted as mainstream by gay activists and their sympathizers in the news media. In 1991, the founder of the Washington, DC chapter of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) made some startling admissions in an interview with DC's premiere gay tabloid, the Washington Blade.
ACT-UP/DC founder Eric Pollard bragged that he had "helped to create a truly fascist organization." Pollard further boasted that his group subscribed to consciously "subversive modes, drawn largely from the voluminous "Mein Kampf" [by Adolf Hitler], which some of us studied as a working model. As ACT UP/DC grew, we struck intently and surgically into whatever institution we believed to stand in our way..."
Strange admissions indeed, about a group given to stridently accusing its opposition of employing "neo-Nazi" tactics (one of which happens to be accusing your opposition of malevolent acts and attitudes of which you are, in fact, guilty). Evidently, this kind of gay extremist view readily coincides with Adolf Hitler's dictum in "Mein Kampf": "The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."
National gay-rights groups are planning a full-court press this spring to enact federal "hate-crimes" and minority-equivalent legislation based on "sexual orientation." The campaign is built on a foundation of lies calculated to evoke sympathy and induce guilt. Foremost among the falsehoods is the deliberate inflation of "hate-crimes" statistics, a deceit practiced and perfected by the office of Maine's Attorney General. Expect the state and national media to blare stories of "hate" and "homophobia" all across Maine and America in the next few months.Beware the Velvet Glove
Strip away all the bogus rhetoric of victimhood, and the "gay-rights" movement is revealed to be nothing more than a wealthy and powerful special-interest lobby, intent on using its money and political clout to piggyback on the legitimate gains of truly disadvantaged minority groups, to gain special status and privileges for itself -- at the expense of everyone else.
Preferential treatment for homosexual job applicants and employees is already a fact of life in such bastions of gay liberation as Denver and San Francisco. And thanks to an executive order signed by President Clinton last spring, "sexual orientation" is now a minority classification eligible for affirmative action programs in the federal workplace.
Under a national gay-rights law, the implied threat of ruinously expensive lawsuits (unleashed by swarms of taxpayer-funded litigious locusts) will bring about the "transformation" of society desired by the Gay Left. Individuals and businesses who refuse to bend the knee to "political correctness" will be targeted for costly litigation. Search-and-destroy missions such as the city of San Francisco's legal assault against private companies doing business with the city -- alleging "discrimination" by businesses that decline to provide spousal benefits to the sex partners of homosexual employees -- will become the rule rather than the exception from coast to coast.
So, when kindly, compassionate folks like Mr. Rees talk about "inclusion" and "diversity", beware. The velvet glove conceals an iron fist.Lawrence Lockman is chairman of Concerned Maine Families
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