The Hamilton Square Incident: Why Our Republic Cannot Tolerate
One of the remarkable qualities of the familiar story of Noah and the deluge in Genesis 6-8 is its pregnant silence about those "lawless" ones who had so inflamed the wrath of God in the first place. We are left to only imagine what Noah's neighbors must have said to him as he and his sons toiled away in the heat while constructing the ark. One could presume the venerable protagonist of the tale and his family endured a ferocious amount of mockery and derision from his fellow countrymen, many of whom, it turns out, seemed hell-bent on their own destruction. Right up until the day the rains made life rather uncomfortable for those outside the ark, Noah and his family were very likely subjected to insults and abuse for their steadfast adherence to the law of God.
As the French say, plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose (the more things change, the more they remain the same). Several centuries later and in a city halfway around the globe, a series of events unfolded one fall evening late last year that in many ways presented a hauntingly familiar scenario to the Biblical drama just mentioned. In fact, the whole occasion might have been the perfect stage for a TV mini-series had Cecil B. DeMille been around, were it not for the bullhorns and motorcycle gear.
It was Sunday night, September 19, 1993. Just outside the doors of the Hamilton Square Baptist church in the heart of the erstwhile Catholic mission city of San Francisco, California, nearly one hundred devotees of deviancy stalked the church courtyard in protest. Men dressed in leather jeans and chains exchanged deep kisses with one another between verses of anti-Christian chants. A man decked out in the full habit of a nun (rosary and all) walked about, furiously inciting his fellows with the aid of gesticulations and a bullhorn, while another dressed as a priest wildly swung a thurible.
Meanwhile, inside the handsome, brick-lined walls of the church, the regular Sunday evening prayer service was being held. About one hundred people had gathered that night in prayer to hear the featured preacher, Rev. Lou Sheldon, of the California- based Traditional Values Coalition, discuss the collapse of moral integrity in the United States. Although the drama outside had certainly given Rev. Sheldon more than enough material for his sermon that night, he was temporarily prevented from beginning his address due to the fact that those opposed to his views had begun an attempt to storm two large metal emergency doors on the west side of the auditorium, creating a deafening roar inside the church and terrorizing the worshippers inside.
Some parishioners, in fact, had been prevented from even entering the church in the first place. About an hour before the 6:00 PM service was to begin, a riotous mob formed outside and began to hurl verbal grenades at, as well as physically harass, those attempting to enter the church. Several of the more hardy attenders forced their way through the protesters, despite being pelted with rocks or pushed and pulled by the rioters away from the doors of the church.
Interestingly enough, the police, those state employees entrusted with serving and protecting the law-abiding public (a perk Noah did not enjoy, incidentally), did virtually nothing to control the mob. Badly outnumbered despite repeated warnings and requests for help that had been registered several times during the course of the previous week by church officials, the San Francisco Police Department admitted that their hands were tied when it came to dealing with homosexual protests since, in the reported words of one of the officers, City Hall "would not back [the police] up."
The demonstrators then proceeded to take down the American and Christian flags from the flagpole in front of the church, raising their own homosexual banner. When the church's caretaker attempted to remove the obscenity, he was driven back and pelted with eggs. After destroying nearly $2,000 in church property, the disturbance then spilled over into the streets, with activists lying down on the roadways, effectively stopping traffic in all directions until riot police arrived and chased the rioters back into the tenebrous holes of the urban night.
The police made no arrests that evening, and media coverage was virtually nonexistent. News of the event eventually leaked out through the network of Christian radio stations and individual churches across the country. Thousands of letters and phone calls poured into the offices of city officials, who finally promised to allot some time during a regular public session of the City Board of Supervisors to discuss the incident at Hamilton Square Baptist church.
In preparation for the meeting, Hamilton Square Pastor David Innes invited supporters across the country to participate in a "Freedom Rally" on November 8 and to attend the meeting in the city chambers that same day. Four hundred pastors and laymen took him up on his invitation, and sat shoulder to shoulder with militant gay and lesbian activists who had also attempted to fill the board room. As the exchange of testimony from each side wore on, the atmosphere grew more tense. When Dr. Lou Sheldon, the speaker to whom the homophiles had objected so strongly in the first place for his legislative efforts against so-called "gay rights" legislation, finally approached the microphone, he was shouted down (so much for "free speech"). Only after several minutes and a threat to clear the chambers from the presiding City Supervisor did he speak. After Sheldon had finished, he was spat on by a man a few feet away. The assailant was quickly arrested and hauled away, amidst the whistles and cheers of the sodomites in attendance.
How Deviant Is Sodomy?
It would be difficult for any serious social scientist to deny that if the sexual revolution were viewed as an experiment in which the greater part of humanity has participated—albeit some more willingly than others—over the last couple of generations, the lab results are most certainly in. And only the most obtuse of observers could say it has been anything other than a horrific catastrophe for modern man.
According to the Heritage Foundation's Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, a statistical portrait of behavioral patterns in the United States over the last 30 years, there has been more than a 400 percent increase in the rate of illegitimate births, a quadrupling of the number of divorces, a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes, and a more than 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate since 1960. During that same time period, violent crime has increased 560 percent, and abortion has gone from being an infrequent and illegal operation to a "woman's right," with over 4,000 children being murdered every day in the U.S. alone.
In a hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations in early 1992, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, affirmed that a number of sexually transmitted diseases which were not even discovered prior to 1960 have now increased to epidemic proportions. Fauci also testified that classical STDs have experienced a significant resurgence. Syphilis, for example, is at its highest level in more than 40 years—blacks have been especially hard hit, with rates of infection 50 times higher than those among whites. More examples in this area are, unfortunately, not difficult to find. Between 1960 and 1988, the rate of gonorrhea afflicting adolescents has skyrocketed; among 10-14 year olds it has quadrupled and it has tripled among 15-19 year olds (cf. Insight, April 1993). AIDS, not even a blip on the screens of the medical community in 1960, had claimed by 1993 over 100,000 lives in the U.S. alone and has sapped billions of dollars away from other areas of medical research and health care.
So the revolution that was supposed to set modern man free evidently has come at a fairly steep price. And given the severe exigencies of everyday life in most major cities across this country, the freedom supposedly won has not turned out to be all that enjoyable, either. In answer to a paraphrase of a well-worn campaign jingle, "are you freer now than you were 30 years ago?" the answer of most Americans today would be decidedly in the negative.
Does all this imply that the social decay of the last three decades can be attributed solely to those who practice that particular sexual sin known as sodomy? By no means. It is no secret that a kind of glut exists today in the market of sexual misbehavior. Many types of conduct long-looked upon as immoral, if not illegal, by most of humanity up until the present generation are not only becoming more widespread, but actually gaining popular acceptance and even, in some cases, civil sanction. Yet given the pandemic nature of crude carnality, why is it that we seldom hear about the kind of protest that took place at the Hamilton Square Baptist Church being staged by people other than those who commit sodomy?
Adulterers are not usually found picketing churches, nor are teenagers engaged in premarital sex often spotted stopping traffic in an effort to have "right to fornicate" laws passed in Congress. Do chronic masturbators en masse pound down the doors of places in which sermons are preached that condemn their sin? What other type of sexual sub-group has its members regularly dress up like nuns and priests in order to mock the Catholic Church and her teaching on sexuality—even outside Baptist churches? The question thus remains—is there something unique about the sin of homosexual activity that foments and facilitates these and other sorts of anti-social behaviors? And if so, what does it mean for a society when it not only allows, but positively condones this type of conduct through its legal codes? This article will be an attempt to answer just these questions.
There exist a number of statistical facts and historical examples that testify to the unique hazards posed by not only the rampant practice of sodomy, but widespread popular acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle. Before examining these items in detail, however, an important distinction needs to be made between the fundamental difference between homosexual orientation and the so-called "gay" lifestyle. The origins of the former are shrouded in mystery; a number of homosexuals admit that they find themselves so inclined almost in spite of themselves. Many of these people who daily struggle, often heroically, with their disordered condition and are trying to live chaste lives most certainly do not belong in the same class as militant homosexuals.
Those who identify themselves as "gay," (a statistically verifiable misnomer, given the high rates of depression and suicide among homosexual activists, as we shall later see), on the other hand, do not hide their "orientation." On the contrary, they flaunt it loudly and often. Indeed, it seems that a major component of the identity of an active sodomite today is that of the strident revolutionary, as a guerilla in the Kulturkampf'. The initial objectives: recognition of "gays" as a special privileged class within society, the affirmation by society at large of their "sexual choice," and the acknowledgement that every "gay" person has been a victim of heterosexual bigotry or discrimination of some sort.
It follows that "demonstrators" like those at Hamilton Square fall into this second genus. By all accounts, the frequency and intensity of such displays have actually increased even as restrictions against homosexuals and their activity have decreased over the last 30 years. This oddity calls for a re-evaluation of legislation outlawing sexual perversion. Standing as we do waist-deep in a river of malaise brought on by the sexual revolution, one wonders if there was any wisdom behind all those anti-sodomy laws instituted years ago. If not, one wonders, how could they have withstood the test of time for so long? Why have they (or at least their enforcement) all but disappeared from present-day jurisprudence? And finally, would it be possible or prudent to bring them back?
Sodomy And Public Health
Besides the obvious Biblical injunctions against sodomy, a number of essentially non-religious reasons have also traditionally been given for the outlawing of homosexual behavior. Over the years, concern about the net effect on population growth has been cited with great frequency, as has alarm over the perceived loss of masculine qualities that are essential for the survival of any nation. Sanctioning sodomy, it has been feared, would also serve to blur established sex roles and would lead to societal chaos and confusion. Whatever the relative value of reasons like these, we now possess, 30 years after much of the Western world has de facto decriminalized homosexual behavior, a unique perspective with which to judge the phenomenon; and one that offers at least three more convincing reasons why the concept of recriminalizing buggery is a very modest proposal which should be taken quite seriously.
The first of these is that male homosexual genital activity has had a significantly negative impact on public health. Dr. D.J. West, author of the controversial and, by today's standards, only moderately pro-homosexual book The Other Man (copies were confiscated as obscene material in Australia in 1955), noted in his even more homophile Homosexuality Re-Examined (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1977) some 20 years later that "male homosexuals run a particularly high risk of acquiring sexually transmitted diseases" (p. 228). West quoted research which revealed that the troubling and potentially lethal disease of syphilis would have all but disappeared from Great Britain in the early 1970s were it not for the activities of male homosexuals, who accounted for between 46 per cent and 83.3 percent of reported syphilis cases in London-based medical clinics.
It is an almost universally accepted fact, even among those sympathetic to the "gay-rights" movement, like Martin P. Levine, editor of Gay Men: The Sociology of Male Homosexuality (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), that "gay men are extremely sexually active. . . [and] tend to have more casual sexual partners than any other segment of the population" (p. 7). Even though obviously sympathetic to the homosexual agenda, D.J. West also admits that just as medical warnings have failed to abolish smoking, so "the practice of anal intercourse, and the enjoyment of a variety of sexual relationships with different partners, seems an inescapable part of the male homosexual condition" (HRE. p. 232).
What also seems inescapable for the male homosexual is the fascination with homoerotic acts which can only be described, in any number of ways, as sickening. A 1980 report in the New England Journal of Medicine New England Journal of Medicine (1980:302:435-438) by Drs. Lawrence Corey and King Holmes, which included data gleaned from the daily diaries of 96 homosexual subjects, related that nearly all of the homosexuals in the study not only regularly engaged in fellatio (which more often than not includes the ingestion of semen), but that each homosexual man had an average of over 100 different sexual partners per year. The study went on to show quite conclusively how these unsanitary practices contributed in a major way to the spread of the hepatitis A virus.
The same study echoed several other investigations into homosexual conduct when it reported that nearly all gays regularly engage in sodomy, and that well over half do it regularly —i.e., more than once a week. It is a simple biological fact that the anus was never intended to act as a receptacle for penile penetration. Since the anus tears easily during anal intercourse, and given the fact that the rectal wall is only one cell thick, a wide variety of germs and bodily fluids (semen, blood, saliva, urine) can gain easy access to the blood stream, contributing to a breakdown in the immune system. It is also not uncommon for male homosexuals to insert various types of objects into a partner's rectum (fists, arms, bottles, carrots, and even live gerbils stuffed inside socks). Such activity leads inexorably, inter alia, to perpetual incontinence as a result of the virtual destruction of the sphincter muscle.
Another common type of male homosexual activity involves anal-oral contact (also known as "rimming"). A variety of surveys have shown an average of 70 percent of gay men as having engaged in this type of behavior, which corresponded to a very high incidence of infection with hepatitis A and a variety of intestinal parasites. In an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (1980:302:463-464), Dr. Selma Dritz noted that between 70-80 percent of the 75,000 patients the Venereal Disease Clinic of the San Francisco Department of Public Health sees in a typical year are homosexual men, and that at least five percent of those infected with hepatitis A who actually visited the clinic were employed as food handlers in public establishments.
One does not have to possess a Ph.D. to realize that a threat to public health and safety exists when thousands of people who are regularly engaging in these types of unsanitary behaviors and who are thus regularly exposing themselves to dozens of diseases, work and live in close proximity to millions of innocent people. This is not "homophobic" moralizing, but practical wisdom based on scientifically verifiable data. When active homosexual men, who regularly ingest semen or feces and whose own immune systems are playgrounds for all kinds of exotic viruses as a result of their practice of sodomy, are preparing, say, one's supper at a restaurant, hairnets just do not seem to be an adequate defense.
Anyone who has been potty-trained can also pretty much expect that engaging in these types of behaviors eventually have their affect on the longevity of the practitioners. In April 1993, before a convention of the Eastern Psychological Association, researchers Cameron, Playfair, and Wellum presented the results of a study involving a comparison of nearly 7,000 obituaries from 16 U.S. homosexual journals and a large sample of death notices from 12 regular newspapers. The study revealed that the median age of death of married men was 75 and that 80 percent of them died after they had reached the age of 65. Unmarried or divorced men had a median age of death of 57, with 32 percent dying after 65: for single or divorced women the average age was slightly higher, 71, with 60 percent dying old. Married women had the highest average age of death at 79; 85 percent died old.
The median age of death for homosexuals, however, was notably lower. The average age of death for homosexual males was 42, with only 9 percent dying after they had reached the age of 65 or more. This number, incidentally, did not include deaths that resulted from AIDS. Gays with AIDS died, on average, three years earlier, at the age of 39. Among lesbians, the median age of death was also abnormally low, at 45, with only 23 percent surviving past the age of 65.
As the old margarine commercial used to say, "You can't fool Mother Nature." The veracity of this maxim is readily apparent when looking at the data above. The human body, like it or not, is subject to certain biological laws, and suffers when those laws are brushed aside. Meanwhile, as sodomites clamor for what they claim is their constitutional right to swap one another's bodily fluids, the homophile Clinton administration presses on, blissfully ignoring incontrovertible facts like those presented above that clearly show the public health hazards of homosexual conduct. Ever dauntless, however, the guardians of public health wage vigorous campaigns against such menaces as cigarettes, movie butter popcorn, and hazardous lawn mower emissions. The irony here is not difficult to explain.
While promiscuous heterosexual sex also certainly contributes to poorer societal health (though not to the per capita extent that homosexual "sex" does), those committed to the sexual revolution are simply unable to make any kind of judgment about what constitutes sexual deviancy, lest the gavel of their judgment land too close to their own particular sin of choice. Disregard for the moral law in things sexual has so saturated the institutions of the culture that militant homosexuals now find themselves, strangely, in positions of power as they essentially blackmail the establishment, the leading members of which who are more than willing to use the "gay cause" as a way to assuage their guilty consciences.
Sodomy And Criminality
A second way in which homosexual behavior represents a threat to the society lies in the fact that practicing homosexuals are more involved with criminal activity than heterosexuals to a statistically significant degree. Statistics generated by a 1989 survey (cf. Cameron, et. al.. Psychological Reports, vol. 64, 1167-79) support this view. In a random sample involving 4,340 adults in five U.S. metropolitan areas, the study found that homosexuals had been more involved with a wide variety of criminal activities than had heterosexuals.
The survey reported that homosexuals were about four times more likely to have attempted to kill someone, five times more apt to have engaged in torture-related sex, and four times more likely to report having been raped. (Is merely coincidental that the top six U.S. male serial killers, including the recently executed John Wayne Gacy and the infamous Jeffrey Dahmer, were all practicing homosexuals?) Homosexuals also admitted to having been arrested for a non-sexual crime at about twice the rate as heterosexuals, and were about eight times more apt to have been arrested for a sex-related offense. Homosexuals were found to be nearly twice as likely to have been in prison, three times more likely to admit to having made an obscene phone call, and about 50 percent more apt to claim that they had shoplifted, cheated on their income tax, or had not been caught for a crime they had committed.
Evidence of the truth of this analysis has been offered by a rather surprising source: the sodomites themselves. In their book entitled Men Who Beat the Men Who Love Them (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1991), David Island and Patrick Letellier concede that domestic abuse among their fellow gays and lesbians is a serious problem and claim it has been largely ignored by the "gay community." According to statistics garnered from the San Francisco Police Department, the authors claim police responded to nearly 100 calls a month for gay and lesbian domestic violence in 1987 alone. The authors also assert that "partner abuse" is much more likely to occur between homosexuals than heterosexuals, and estimate that between 350,000 and 650,000 gay men are "victimized" each year in the United States by their "lovers" (p. 15).
While it might be a difficult task for the unenlightened to distinguish between the victim and the victimizer given the realities of homoerotic behavior, there is no confusion about the casualties due to the higher rates of suicide for homosexual men. D.J. West is not alone in noting that "relatively high incidences of completed or contemplated suicide among homosexuals have been noted by several authorities" (p. 198), as the survey by Cameron, et. al. mentioned above noted that homosexuals were three times as likely to have attempted suicide than heterosexuals. While technically a criminal offense (albeit the only crime for which a person may not be prosecuted if he is successful), statistically significant higher suicide rates among a particular group of people is a signal of a much deeper disorder within that class, and one that merits close attention by those entrusted with the maintenance of public safety.
At last check, the prevailing ethos over this country still had retained enough of the moral code to disavow child abuse. Before this seemingly obvious moral absolute gets flushed away like so many of its cousins, it would be important to mark well the rate at which homosexuals engage in this type of morally heinous and criminal behavior.
In a 1994 critique of the amici curiae brief filed with the Virginia Court of Appeals by the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers on behalf of a lesbian mother demanding custody of her 2-year old son, Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute presents a comprehensive assessment of the data regarding child molestation and homosexuality. Using reports of molestation by the general population, surveys of those convicted of molestation, and polls of homosexuals themselves, Cameron estimates that even though homosexuals account for at the very most perhaps 2 percent of the adult population, they account for between 20-40 percent of all molestations of children. While noting that not every homosexual is a child molester, he concludes that if 2 percent of a given population is responsible for roughly one-third of something as "socially and personally troubling as child molestation, something must be desperately wrong with that two percent."
Edmund White, in his book States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (New York: Dutton, 1980), gives an astonishing account of his own experiences among several homosexual enclaves across the U.S., from Los Angeles and San Francisco on the West Coast to Boston and New York on the East, as well as several places in between. White proffers a substantial amount of evidence to corroborate the self-destructive and criminal conduct of active homosexuals, and reveals the three main characteristics of most of the colonies in which he both visited and took part: a wide array of drugs, sadistic violence, an increasing spiral of sexual perversion, and death.
White quotes at length the frank (albeit vulgar) comments of David Goodstein, erstwhile publisher of the homosexual journal The Advocate, as he describes a particular group of gays in San Francisco:
Their relationships are brief, they don't work but live off welfare, they hang out like teenagers, they drink too much, they take too many drugs, they f**k day and night, they are scattered—and of course radical politically. They act like kids in a candy store. San Francisco has an unusually large educated white male population on relief. I oppose the gay obsession with sex. Most gay men have their lives led for them by their c**ks. In return for ten minutes of pleasure they design the rest of the day (p. 37).
Practitioners of sadomasochism ("leather men"), according to White, are mostly "educated whites from middle-class families" and have "frequently been either pacifists or vegetarians" (p. 54). He wonders why S&M emerged only after "gay liberation" began with the Stonewall Inn riots in 1969, a movement which was "supposed to have banished all role-playing and to have promoted angelic androgyny" (p. 55). While he notes that many gays dress up like police officers and soldiers when engaging in S&M acts, the homosexual White blames society for this behavior, likening it to Jews' sympathy for the Nazis as a strategy for survival otherwise known as "identifying with the oppressor" (p. 12). Characteristically, the homosexual lobby also blames "long-term societal repression" of gays for their statistically verifiable higher rates of depression and suicide.
To those acquainted with either a working knowledge of the moral life or the body of literature of Western civilization, this is not surprising. The misuse of the Creator's gift of sexuality sets one on a trajectory that can only end in violence, disgust, horror, and death. But it is a lesson some people—from Nero to Nietzsche—seem to be able to learn only the hard way.
Sodomy As Subversive Activity
The third reason why a strong case can be made today for the criminalizing of homosexual conduct can be seen in the power of sodomy as a destructive and subversive force within society. Sodomy has long been viewed not only as a destroyer of stable family life, the basic building block of any society, but also of the other constitutive elements In a body politic—e.g., military life—due at least in part to the reckless promiscuity and essential impermanence of the so-called "gay" lifestyle. In their study of homosexual lifestyles in San Francisco entitled Homosexualities (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), researchers Alan P. Bell and Martin Weinberg found that nearly half of the men they encountered in the course of their study claimed to have had sexual relations with over five hundred people (p. 308).
Numerous other surveys have shown how unstable the gay lifestyle is, with many more job-changes, moves, and broken relationships for homosexuals than heterosexuals. Yet the extent to which sodomy acts as a subversive element in a culture is not exhausted by these examples. No, it is far more complex than licentiousness and personal instability, and for reasons much more troubling than those regarding public health or even criminal statistics.
It is obvious that sodomites have no way of perpetuating themselves except through the recruitment of others. The seducing of the young is widespread among homosexuals, with research showing that nearly three out of five homosexuals got their start in homoerotic behavior only after having been seduced by an older person. Yet it is also true to say that most homosexuals are deeply ambivalent about the lifestyles in which they find themselves. Bell and Weinberg, in their already cited survey Homosexualities, noted that over half of the gays they surveyed expressed regret about their homosexuality (p. 337). Another study, entitled The Kinsey Data (New York: Saunders. 1979), by Sex Institute researchers P.H. Gebhard and A.B. Johnson, showed that approximately four times as many gays would advise teenagers who were just beginning homosexual activity to stop rather than continue.
Thus, we have here the convergence of two important factors: First, the need for sodomites to perpetuate their movement: and second, the deep ambivalence that many practicing homosexuals have with regard to their own self-proclaimed identities. This volatile mix is bound to produce quite a bit of sublimated rage, which manifests itself in a variety of ways.
Homosexual journals make no secret of this desire to perpetuate the sodomy movement through seduction, nor do they hide the concomitant ire. In the December 29, 1992 issue of the Advocate, writer Donna Minkowitz issued a clarion call in an article entitled "Recruit, recruit, recruit!" (from the Family Research Report, Nov-Dec 1993, P. 7):
We have been on the defensive far too long. . . . 'phobes like Pat Robertson are right when they say that we threaten the family, male domination, and the Calvinist ethic of work and grimness that has paralyzed most Americans' search for pleasure. . . . Indeed, instead of proclaiming our innocuousness, we ought to advertise our potential to change straight society in radical, beneficial ways. . . . Let's take the offensive for a change, whether the issue is promiscuity or recruiting the previously straight. Remember that most of the line about homosex [sic] being one's nature, not a choice, was articulated as a response to brutal repression. "It's not our fault!" gay activists began to declaim a century ago, when queers first began to organize in Germany and England. "We didn't choose this, so don't punish us for it!" One hundred years later, it's time for us to abandon this defensive posture and walk upright on the earth. Maybe you didn't choose to be gay—that's fine. But I did.
Another activist, Michael Swift, writing in The Gay Community News of Feb. 15-21, 1987, in an article entitled "Speaking up for the Homoerotic Order," promised (from the May 1994 issue of Catalyst, the newsletter of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights):
We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding. They shall be recast in our image. They will come to crave us and adore us.
The dangerous effects of homosexual seduction and the whole concept of sodomy as subversive activity were documented by—however incongruous it may seem in these days of "political correctness" —a committee of the U.S. Senate in 1950. The interim report on the "Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government" was overseen by Senator Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina and six other senators, including Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. After studying the "medical, psychiatric, sociological, and legal aspects of the problem," and after consulting numerous experts from the various fields, the committee concluded that "homosexuals and other sex perverts are not proper persons to be employed in Government for two reasons; first, they are generally unsuitable, and second, they constitute security risks."
Besides the fact that sex perverts engage in "criminality and immorality," both of which make them unsuitable for "positions of responsibility," the report warned further that, "the presence of a sex pervert in a Government agency tends to have a corrosive influence upon his fellow employees. These perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices. This is particularly true in the case of young and impressionable people who might come under the influence of a pervert. . . . One homosexual can pollute a Government office."
But how are sodomites subversive? The subcommittee's report pointed to a number of factors, and the members took special pains to note their conclusions had not been based on mere "conjecture," but upon a careful review of the testimony that was given by the FBI, CIA, and the intelligence branches of the Armed Forces. The report claims the sex pervert's "lack of emotional stability" and "weakness of moral fiber" makes him an easy prey to the "blandishments of the foreign espionage agent." Since perverts "seldom refuse to talk about themselves," as well as tend to congregate at the same easily identifiable night clubs and the like, they are easy prey to both the spy and the blackmailer.
The subcommittee's report then discusses at length the case of one Captain Raedl, the chief of the Austrian army's counterintelligence service in 1912. He enjoyed great success in this position until the Russians found out he was a homosexual, caught him in flagrante delictu, and blackmailed him into giving away Austrian and German military secrets. Thus, when World War I broke out, Austria and Germany were caught with their collective pants down, as it were, completely unaware of Russia's true intentions, and suffered greatly as a result. Raedl's traitorous acts were discovered shortly thereafter but he committed suicide before he could be hanged.
The members of the Senate subcommittee, however adroit they were at exposing the national security risks of employing sexual perverts, left untouched the more pernicious roots of the subversive nature of sodomy. A much more helpful example of the quintessential subversive sodomite would be that of Sir Anthony Blunt, whose life is examined with great acumen by Dr. E. Michael Jones in his 1993 work Degenerate Moderns. The writings as well as the biographies of Blunt and the other members of the Bloomsbury elite, that circle of homophile academicians in and around Cambridge University during the decades between the world wars, reveal with uncanny clarity the sublimated rage that lies barely hidden underneath the skin of sodomites.
Blunt's entry into the homosexual lifestyle began while he was in college; Cambridge had become a sort of haven for homosexuals, including the likes of E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. It was there that Blunt appropriated one of the most important principles of the code of sexual perversion: orgasm is everything. Nothing else matters, and anything that obstructs one's vision and experience of one's homoerotic thrills must be obliterated. Just as a deeply ambivalent attitude towards authority and rage against nature would be turned outward by Keynes in his "childless" deficit- inducing economic theory, so Blunt turned it outward against his country.
What mattered most to Anthony Blunt while employed by the British intelligence service M15 during World War II was not his country, but his sodomy. While among the Bloomsbury circle. Blunt appropriated E.M. Forster's famous aphorism: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Blunt did so, as did his "friend" and fellow spy Guy Burgess, and England has probably not yet recovered from the effects of their combined decades of traitorous activity. It wasn't just that Blunt was an easy mark for Soviet blackmailers like poor old Captain Raedl—Blunt actually wanted to betray his country because of the fury deep within him over his own homosexuality and his sublimated urge to blame his society for his own alienation.
Sin carries with it an element of guilt, and if a person's conscience is not too atrophied, it can usually generate enough willpower so that the individual repents and avoids similarly destructive acts in the future. The alternative to contrition, of course, is rationalization. But guilt is an impressively powerful force and a jealous one at that. If a person does not heed its call to repentance, guilt establishes itself by taking up residence deep within the subject's psyche.
Like a grain of sand in an oyster, it then becomes not only a constant irritant, but the occasion for steady and substantial psychic operations, often generating monstrously hideous "pearls" like large scale social movements in which others likewise afflicted in their consciences come together and convince themselves over and over again that what they are doing is not really that bad after all, or at least not as bad as compared to those who commit some really serious sin like not taking the labels off of one's recyclable goods. Those so afflicted often suddenly become consumed as well with concern about some other class of "victims," from humpbacked whales to laboratory monkeys. In fact, over time their sin of choice is even transformed into a virtue which is to be crammed down the throats of those who even quietly do not concur—the churchgoers at the Hamilton Square Baptist church spring immediately to mind.
In the wake of the many faces of homosexual rage, from sadomasochism to "partner abuse" and from suicides to riots, it seems reasonable to assume there is something so intrinsically heinous about the sin of sodomy that if it is not confessed and repented of, the tremendous level of guilt that results creates several psychological needs that are as deep-seated as they are ambivalent: to continually and recklessly engage in the behavior itself (which may, like other sexual sins, become a neurotic compulsion); to violently attempt to force others to accept the essential rightness of homosexual conduct; to perpetuate the ideology through recruitment: and to destroy any reminder of the natural order authored by the Creator which so obviously runs counter to their desires, including the institution of marriage and even "straight" society itself.
After all, with whom were the protesters at Hamilton Square Baptist church really angry? The dozens of middle-class churchgoers or God Himself and that troublesome moral law of His which they perceive to be raining on their parade? And why mock Catholic religiosity outside a Baptist church (years ago, some Protestants might not have even objected!) unless there is an underlying fidelity to moral truth that connects the two religious bodies? And finally, if there really is no big deal about sodomy, then why the fuss? Why not let the "crazy" Christians fume and fuss over a non-issue, allow them to invite "old-fashioned" speakers until hell freezes over and then watch them die out? But then again, maybe the reason the protestors keep shouting is that they know it's not the Christians who have to worry about dying out.
Given the awful exigencies of the sodomite's psyche, it is beyond ridiculous to believe that something like advertising condoms during prime time will make any difference whatsoever in stopping the spread of one of the many negative side-effects of homosexual behavior. This naive thinking, of course, assumes (above and beyond the erroneous supposition that condoms prevent the spread of AIDS) that homosexuals want to cooperate in the prevention of forces which threaten innocent life and endanger the health of the society. But as the research quoted in this article has shown, the data is in on how much active homosexuals esteem the created order, and it is not encouraging.
How else are we to explain the fact that the AIDS scare has had a negligible effect on the sexual practices of male homosexuals, whom surveys have shown to have only mildly reduced their number of partners, even when sex means death for one or both of them? In a report for the American Journal of Public Health (1985: 75:493-496), Leon McKusick and Drs. William Horstman and Thomas Coates noted in a November 1983 study of 655 gay men in San Francisco a decline in the average number of sex partners from 76 partners per year to 47 partners per year, and concluded that although "knowledge of health guidelines was quite high. . . this knowledge had no relation to behavior" (p. 493).
Although the average number of partners declined, unsafe sexual behavior did not. Furthermore, even though 47 partners/year might be a lower number than in years previous, it is still about 47 too many if a person is seriously trying to avoid contracting or spreading potentially lethal diseases.
And what about the phenomenon of deliberate infection? A recent study mentioned in the British Medical Journal (1992: 305:1435-6) reported that almost half of the patients from three London STD clinics got infected with rectal gonorrhea after they already knew they had the HIV virus. (One wonders if they got what they deserved?) And then there is "patient zero" (the man who put the "s" in sadism), that infamous Canadian flight attendant who is held to be responsible for at least 40 of the first 248 cases of AIDS in the U.S., having knowingly and deliberately shared his diseased body with over 250 men per year throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Writing in the September 1980 issue of Commentary magazine. Midge Decter, in an essay on homosexuals entitled 'The Boys on the Beach," recounts a slightly remorseful remark on the part of a homosexual friend of hers that at gay bars "there are usually never enough sadists to go around." Decter wonders aloud if the masochistic behavior of many practicing homosexuals hasn't increased over the last thirty years in indirect proportion to the removal of societal barriers against sodomy:
Having to some extent succeeded in staying the hand of the cops—in New York, they now annually play softball together—can it be that they feel the need to supply for themselves—the missing ration of brutality? Having to a very great extent overcome the revulsion of common opinion, are they left with some kind of unappeased hunger that only their own feelings of hatefulness can now satisfy?
The answer to Decter's insightful question might lie in the active homosexual's intense need for acceptance. As some psychiatrists have suggested (e.g., E. Moberly, G. van den Aardweg, J. Nicolosi, et. al.), this craving for affirmation may be an attempt to make up for a perceived or actual lack of love and approval from a father figure in childhood. It may also be a result of intense pangs from a guilty conscience seeking approval for its sins. The irony in either case is that the homosexual's craving for approval can only come from an authority figure whom they fiercely resent. Hence, a vicious cycle of forbidden fury is created for militant sodomites: their beleaguered consciences keep reminding them that their conduct is immoral and disgusting, yet since they themselves are unable to accept this judgment, they turn in frustration to an authority figure, seeking an outlet through with they could experience some vicarious relief for their tortured interiorities. In years past, they could pretty much count on a negative judgment. But as the authority of both church and state have relaxed their restrictions since the sexual revolution began in the 1960s, active homosexuals have been forced to come up with even more outrageous behavior with which to provoke the phlegmatic authorities so that they can be punished.
If this hypothesis is true, could it be that the re-criminalization of sexual perversion might actually be doing sodomites a favor by driving those who would be militants back into the closet, thus simultaneously preventing thousands of others from entering it in the first place through experimentation and out of adolescent rebellion? One wonders if we will ever be able to answer such a question, given the Zeitgeist of the prevailing culture. In any case, these concerns about the stability—indeed, the very existence—of the republic represent the primary rationale for making sodomy illegal. Although solicitude for protecting public health, curtailing criminal behavior, and preventing the loss of national secrets is noble and good, the real danger of rampant sodomy flows from the seething, self-consuming, and volcanic-like rage that is pent up deep inside active homosexuals, a rage that erupts with increasing violence and frequency as sodomites seek the destruction of the created order they find so abhorrent.
History Of Criminality
The distinctive dangers brought on by homosexual behavior were noted as early as the book of Genesis, when in chapter 19 the city of Sodom is destroyed after all the men of the city had lusted after Lot's two visitors, who just so happened to be the angels sent by God to destroy the city for their "unnatural vice." The book of Leviticus lays down the death sentence for a whole series of sexual crimes, but specially mentions sodomy:
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives (Lev. 20:13-NAB).
Early Christians, too, recognized the dangers inherent in homosexual conduct. St. Paul specifically mentions more than once that these acts can separate one from salvation:
Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity (Romans 1:26-27-NAB: see also 1 Cor. 6:9-10: 1 Tim. 1:9-11; Jude 7: et. al.).
Homosexual behavior was against the law across all of Christian Europe almost without exception up until the late 20th century. But it is certainly not only within Christian monarchies that sodomy laws have been enforced. Pagan Athens had laws against certain homosexual practices in the 5th century B.C., as did many other pagan cultures.
This is so because sodomy violates the natural law, which existed long before Christianity or even Judaism. As St. Thomas Aquinas says in his Summa Theologica (I-II, Q. 91, A. 2):
It (the rational creature) has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and end: and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law. . .the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature's participation of the eternal law.
While St. Thomas would say that the Catholic Church has been entrusted by God with the task of offering the best interpretation of the natural law through His Holy Spirit, and that it is only through Christ that one can live out the demands of this law faithfully, he would also argue that no human being is exempt from the demands of the natural law, precisely because it pertains to man's very nature. Humanity bears upon itself the mark of its Creator, and is made with certain purposes in mind. Man is free to reject those purposes, of course, but he does so only at his own peril. And the effects of that rejection—e.g., guilt and sickness—are really the built-in means by which man is invited to come to his senses. As St. Augustine writes in his Confessions: "You have ordered it, and it is true: every disordered soul is its own penalty" (Book 1:12).
Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Ethics, it must be remembered, were written by men who did not know the historical Jesus, yet both works still present some sound moral guidance. A Sophoclean morality play like Oedipus Rex certainly reflects much of the truth contained in the natural moral law, but the historical separation between Sophocles and Moses or St. Paul did not mean the man was left to drift in a sea of moral anomie. God cares for all His children, and although He quite literally died that all men might be saved and come to a full knowledge of the truth which sets them free, His plan still contains contingencies for those who, for whatever reason, are not able to know Him as fully here on earth as His infinite love would prefer.
The point here is that a government does not have to be populated exclusively by members of the same church or sect in order that it run efficiently and according to the basic dictates of the moral law. As Pope John Paul II says in his masterful 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, the natural law is both universal and immutable, and is a fundamental requirement for a working society:
In the end, only a morality which acknowledges certain norms as valid always and for everyone, with no exception, can guarantee the ethical foundation of social existence, both on the national and international levels (VS, #97).
In the absence of an acknowledgement by the society of transcendent truth, the pope continues, "the force of power takes over." If a democracy tolerates ethical relativism, it commits suicide:
Indeed, if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism (VS, # 101).
Written law becomes necessary, then, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, for the "correction" of the natural law, either because it supplies what was wanting to the natural law: or because the natural law was perverted In the hearts of some men, as to certain matters, so that they esteemed those things good which are naturally evil: which perversion stood in need of correction (1-11, Q. 94, A. 5).
The precepts of the natural law can even be blotted out, according to Aquinas:
…either by evil persuasions. . . or by vicious customs and corrupt habits, as among some men, theft, and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states (Rom. 1), were not esteemed sinful (1-11, Q. 94, A. 6).
The "unnatural vices" to which he refers in this passage are none other than the sexual perversions practiced by some Roman pagans (cf. Rom. 1:24-27). Sexual perversions, then, can not only darken the intellect and enslave the will of the individual sinner, but also tear at the fabric of the larger society because of their antinomian character.
Evidence for the moral ubiquity of the natural law can even be seen in the pre-sexual revolution United States. While far from a federation of theocracies, all 50 states had laws against sodomy until some began to liberalize them in the early 1960s. Interestingly enough, Thomas Jefferson, the author of our Constitution, has been quoted as recommending that male homosexuals be castrated (cf. B. Pines, Back to Basics, p. 211). The young Franklin D. Roosevelt got into some hot water while still only Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1919, when he, in what was later considered by Congress to be an overzealous and improper attempt to rid the Navy of sodomites, employed a phalanx of enlisted men as undercover agents in a sting operation against a homosexual network at the Newport, Rhode Island naval training station—which essentially chloroforms any hope of a historical foundation for the current policy of the Clinton administration vis-a-vis gays in the military. And even as late as 1965, the law against sodomy in North Carolina read as follows:
Any person who shall commit the abominable and detestable crime against nature, not to be named among Christians, with either mankind or beast, shall be adjudged guilty of a felony, and shall suffer death without the benefit of clergy,
Modern Jurisprudence
This, of course, has all changed, despite the 1986 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court (Bowers v. Hardwick) in which then-Justice Byron White, writing for the five-judge majority, argued that there is no fundamental federal constitutional right to engage in sodomy. According to a 1992 book by the American Civil Liberties Union bearing the title The Rights of Lesbians and Gay Men, 24 states have formally decriminalized private consensual adult homosexual acts since Illinois became the first state to do so back in 1961. The most recent member of this group of states is Wisconsin, which did away with their sodomy statute in 1983.
While many states still have retained their laws against anal and oral sex (Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia), prosecution of violators is relatively rare. It might be of interest to certain high-ranking public officials that within the District of Columbia, it is still technically considered a felony to perform "any sex act involving the mouth or anus of one person and the sex organs of another," (22-3502) punishable by 10 years in prison and/or a $1,000 fine. Countries such as Chile, Italy, and Romania have similar laws expressly forbidding sodomy, while many other nations—such as Brazil, Colombia, Greece, Hungary, Peru, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela—refuse to allow known homosexuals to serve in the military forces.
But is re-criminalizing buggery (or more consistently enforcing already-existing laws) the way out of the dilemma that afflicts us in these United States? While it is very true that not every vice can or even should be made illegal (cf. Summa Theologica, 1-11, Q. 91, A. 4), this notion obviously does not preclude the criminalizing of those acts which do in fact endanger to a significant degree the life and health of the community. For example, while irreligion may be a sin, it would be rather foolhardy in this day and age to try and criminalize not going to church. If one's irreligion becomes extreme, however, and turns into vandalizing churches out of hatred for God, that is a criminal offense. The question arises: is sodomy (not simply a homosexual orientation) actually a threat to the society? On the basis of preventing public health disasters, curtailing certain kinds of criminal acts, and safeguarding the integrity of our society, a good case can be made that yes, sodomy does indeed fall into this category.
But what about heterosexual deviancy? Isn't that as destructive as the homosexual variety, some may ask? It is a very fair question, and one that was asked with great acerbity by some of the respondents to Midge Decter's already-cited piece in Commentary in 1980. Allen Frantzen, writing from Chicago, complained that Decter:
…argues in part that gay men avoid women because they do not want to be fathers: what has she to say about non-gay men who sleep with women who frustrate fertilization by birth control? Is their desire to avoid "replacement of oneself by others" any different, in its consequences for population growth, from male homosexual intercourse?
This astute question proves once again that even a broken clock is right at least two times a day. Sodomy represents the far end of the trajectory that occurs when sex is used outside of marriage. What begins with pornography and masturbation turns into premarital sex, contraception, and adultery; the next perversion on the downward spiral is prostitution; then comes sodomy, which leads inexorably to sickness, death, and horror. Of course fornication, sodomy, and sadomasochism are as objectively sinful for heterosexuals as they are for homosexuals. The question is whether the society is threatened to the same extent by these actions and, more to the point, can at present legislate against such heterosexual conduct done in private. Once again we note that heterosexuals do not trumpet their deviant behavior to the same extent that homosexuals do, and this goes to the heart of what it means to be a committed sodomite.
One of the main questions a movement to make sodomy illegal would need to face would be on the issue of suitable punishment. A 1992 letter from the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled "Some considerations concerning the Catholic response to legislative proposals on the nondiscrimination of homosexual persons" is instructive in this regard. It states in part:
Homosexual persons, as human persons, have the same rights as all persons including that of not being treated in a manner which offends their personal dignity. Among other rights, all persons have the right to work, to housing, etc. Nevertheless, these rights are not absolute. They can be legitimately limited for objectively disordered external conduct. This is sometimes not only licit but obligatory. This would obtain moreover not only in the case of culpable behavior but even in the case of actions of the physically or mentally ill. Thus it is accepted that the state may restrict the exercise of rights, for example, in the case of contagious or mentally ill persons, in order to protect the common good.
Given the fact that the culpability for homosexual acts may be difficult to determine, the legal system would have to treat convicted sodomites almost on a case-by-case basis, and almost always involve some sort of therapeutic care. For first time offenders, it would seem great leniency would be in order. For repeat offenders, fines and a loss of certain privileges would seem prudent, especially those pertaining to sensitive positions in the society: in military service, certain government positions, as teachers and coaches, at least certain jobs within the day care and health care industries, etc. For hardened sodomites, some type of incarceration might be called for, but it would have to be truly purgatorial and not simply become some sort of "reward" where deviants could live out the rest of their days in the "homosexual havens" so many prisons seem to have become.
Several studies have shown that a wide variety of cultural and environmental factors can play a role in the determination of a particular person's homosexuality, including, as was mentioned earlier, seduction at a tender age by an older person. It stands to reason, then, that one of the main advantages of removing the extremely neurotic active homosexual from the streets would be to protect young adults from the advances of those of their own sex who are statistically more likely to make such advances, thus slowing the spread of the sodomite ideology.
Conclusion
Noah's neighbors, were they alive today, might be nervously eyeing the exits given the type of sexual misbehavior running rampant in our streets. But if our culture does nothing to respond to the attack on our institutions coming from the sodomite corner, not only will events like the revolting display at Hamilton Square Baptist church occur with greater frequency and intensity (along with similarly demented and violent counter-reactions by those among the masses opposed to the radical "gay" agenda), but, even more seriously, it will not take a flood to destroy whatever is left of our civilization.
Michael J. Mazza is a frequent contributor to Fidelity Magazine.
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