Note: This is the second in a series of articles explaining the history behind today’s LGBT movement. Read Part 1.
In Part 1 of this series, “The LGBT strategy to gain constitutional protection,” I detailed how the four-decade-long LGBT campaign to win legal protections for their lifestyle choices under the “right to privacy” was thwarted in the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick case, at which time they pivoted to a new strategy seeking special rights as a civil rights minority under the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The cornerstone of the new strategy was convincing the courts and the public that homosexuality was an innate and unchangeable condition, not a behavioral choice: the “born gay” hoax.
While the notion that homosexuals were “born gay” goes back to Karl Heinrichs Ulrich, the “grandfather of gay rights” in the mid-1880s in Germany, the idea was not truly central to the American LGBT movement prior to Bowers, and many if not most “gays” treated sexuality as a matter of choice – a choice that should be protected in their view under the right to privacy.
But after the publication of their strategic social engineering blueprint (“The Overhauling of Straight America”) it became obligatory for all homosexuals and allies to learn, parrot and promote a new narrative in which LGBTs 1) were victims of gross societal discrimination; 2) that this was especially grievous because homosexual status was an innate and unchangeable condition, not a behavioral choice; and 3) that these “sexual minorities” would never be safe from hatred and violence until good-hearted people throughout society rose up to protect them in the cause of social justice and to enact laws against “homophobic” discrimination.
For the advancement of that narrative and agenda, the LGBTs began forming “human rights committees” in the late 1980s and early ’90s, primarily at the city level, both to create a sense of urgency about “discrimination” as a social crisis and to bundle “sexual minorities” together with legally established legitimate minority groups to foster the perception of equivalence. Racial minorities nearly always served as figureheads of these committees (and indeed, the black civil rights movement was fully hijacked through this process) but the driving force was always the LGBT movement.
Usually, these committees focused their efforts on combating “hate crimes,” and public opinion about these crimes was shaped by annual or more frequent reports on “hate crime” statistics, based largely upon unverified citizen reporting systems that served to create the impression that “hate” was a significant and growing problem in the community that could only be solved by anti-discrimination ordinances passed into law by local authorities. Incidental “hate crimes” (real or staged) in the community provided additional opportunities to push for these laws. If a local community was too conservative to include “sexual orientation” in the list of protected groups, it would be left out at first and added by amendment later.
This “Lavender Bulldozer” strategy, as I called it, was brilliantly diabolical and very effective. They used the left’s control of the “blue” cities to work from the bottom up to establish the appearance of a nationwide trend of citizen support for the concept of homosexuals as a civil rights minority group meeting all the elements of the constitutional legal test. And wherever “sexual orientation” was granted anti-discrimination protections, the entire LGBT agenda would eventually follow, because opposition and dissent became – in essence – immoral if not actually illegal beyond the technical parameters of the law. And, of course, the left conspired to act as if all opposition was illegal. In virtually every jurisdiction where it passed, the anti-discrimination “shield” against losing one’s home or job for “being gay” was in actual practice a “sword” for offensive culture war against all dissenters – including some Christian bakers and other service companies made famous for refusing to submit to bullying.
Once the Lavender Bulldozer strategy had been proven at the municipal level, it was recreated across the cultural landscape, including the business realm, evolving over several decades into today’s phenomenon of “woke” fascist control of huge swaths of corporate America.
But these were just side benefits of the LGBT campaign to gain special rights for themselves in constitutional law, which few people outside of their own circles realized was the ultimate goal.
The leaders of the Oregon Citizens Alliance were among those few who had looked behind the curtain and knew what was coming. In 1992, we designed Measure 9, the No Special Rights Act, to thwart the LGBT movement’s effort. Its simple premise was that voluntary sexual conduct was not a proper basis for minority status, especially not conduct that was manifestly “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.” As OCA state communications director it was my job to explain and defend Measure 9 in the media and directly to the voters.
My first and most basic line of argument was that if any people, by simply declaring themselves “gay,” could get the same hard-won, enhanced rights that had been legitimately earned by blacks, it would make a mockery of the civil rights movement.
No less eminent a figure than Gen. Colin Powell agreed with that premise, stating in a letter to Democratic Rep. Pat Schroeder on May 18, 1992 ( just six months before the vote on Measure 9): “Skin color is a benign, non-behavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of all human behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument.”
It is a testament to the importance of Measure 9 as an attempt to prevent eventual LGBT cultural hegemony, that Powell’s eloquent summary of the truth about sexual orientation can hardly be found on the internet without prior knowledge of its verbiage, and great persistence. A quote that should hold a very prominent place in the history of the culture war is more heavily suppressed by Big Tech than even the pernicious talking points of Holocaust deniers. (I was only eventually able to cite it here because I kept a physical newspaper clipping from the Salem-Statesman Journal newspaper of June 6, 1992, in my personal records.) If Measure 9 had become constitutional law in Oregon, the culture war on homosexuality would not as likely have ended with the LGBTs and their allies having the power to censor and/or “cancel” dissenting voices.
I compare the suppression of Powell’s quote to that of Holocaust deniers intentionally, because the LGBTs’ successful hijacking of the black civil rights movement directly parallels its unsuccessful attempt to also hijack the Holocaust.
I will detail that aspect of the Battle for Measure 9 in my next installment.
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