[lavender] FW: [Lavender-caucus] The growing 30-year anti-gay holy war (Bob Moser, Southern Poverty Law Center)

[Owen Broadhurst]

----Original Message Follows----
From: Scott McLarty <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
To: lavender-caucus at green.gpus.org
Subject: [Lavender-caucus] The growing 30-year anti-gay holy war (Bob 
Moser,Southern Poverty Law Center)
Date: Sun, 1 May 2005 23:54:35 -0700 (PDT)

(For more on 'dominionism', the movement to
install Christian theocratic rule over the US,
read "Feeling the hate with the National
Religious Broadcasters" by Chris Hedges, in the
current (May 2005) issue of Harper's Magazine. --
Scott)


Holy War
The religious crusade against gays has been
building for 30 years. Now the movement is
reaching truly biblical proportions

By Bob Moser
Southern Poverty Law Center
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=862


On June 26, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court
overturned the convictions of two Texas men
arrested for having sex. Writing for the majority
in Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Anthony Kennedy
said that the two men were "entitled to respect
for their private lives." The state, he declared,
"cannot demean their existence or control their
destiny by making their private sexual conduct a
crime."

The decision was unusually popular. A national
survey found that 75% of Republicans and 88% of
Democrats wanted to see sodomy laws struck down.
But not everyone cheered.

"Six lawyers robed in black have magically
discovered a right of privacy that includes
sexual perversion," said Jan LaRue, chief counsel
for Concerned Women for America. "This opens the
door to bigamy, adult incest, polygamy and
prostitution," said Ken Connor, president of the
Family Research Council.

For anti-gay crusaders, who have been fighting
gay rights for three decades, Lawrence was the
most unsettling court decision since Roe v. Wade.
Fundamentalist groups had filed 15 briefs
supporting Texas' sodomy laws, only to see their
arguments — that gay sex was a threat to public
health and "traditional family values," and that
gay people do not deserve equal rights — shot
down.

And with the Massachusetts Supreme Court widely
expected to rule that fall (as it did) that gay
citizens had a right to marry under that state's
constitution, anti-gay leaders realized the time
was ripe to ratchet up their call to arms.

"America stands at a defining moment," said Lou
Sheldon, founder of the Traditional Values
Coalition. "The only comparison is our battle for
independence."

The anti-gay movement was about to show why many
believe it is, in the words of longtime religious
right observer Frederick Clarkson, "the
best-organized faction in politics." Immediately
after the Lawrence decision, D. James Kennedy,
president of Coral Ridge Ministries, issued a
call to arms.

Now that America's courts were "officially
off-limits to the moral framework that has
allowed us to enjoy freedom and prosperity,"
Kennedy said the holy war on gay rights should be
renewed on the battlefront of public opinion,
pressing for a federal marriage amendment.

For right-wing evangelical ministries like Coral
Ridge, which brings in more than $35 million
annually, the stakes were never higher. Since the
late 1970s, attacks on gay people and their
"agenda" had helped to fuel, and pay for, the
fundamentalist right's unprecedented rise to
political power.

 >From Lawrence to Election Day, when 11 states
voted on anti-gay marriage amendments, groups
like Coral Ridge and Focus on the Family spent
millions on ad campaigns and get-out-the-vote
efforts, while gay marriage and "family values"
became staples of cable-TV and talk-radio
crossfire.

These anti-gay messages were nothing new. For
almost 30 years, the religious right in America
has employed a variety of strategies, inside the
courtroom and outside, in its efforts to beat
back the increasingly confident gay rights
movement.

Many of its leaders have engaged in the crudest
type of name-calling, describing homosexuals as
"perverts" with "filthy habits" who seek to
snatch the children of straight parents and
"convert" them to gay sex. They have continually
bandied about disparaging "facts" about gays that
are simply untrue — assertions that are
remarkably reminiscent of the way white
intellectuals and scientists once wrote about the
"bestial" black man.

But never has the anti-gay movement had the
momentum it has now, and never has it been so
close to achieving its larger, ultimate goal.
That goal is winning, in the words of Focus on
the Family founder James Dobson, a "second civil
war" for control of the U.S. government.


The Power of the Sword

At the height of the civil rights movement, in
1965, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, an ambitious young
minister in Lynchburg, Va., gave a sermon called
"Ministers and Marches."

Falwell laid into Christian leaders who were
actively supporting civil rights, reminding them
of a Bible verse that fundamentalists often
invoked as evidence that God did not want them to
participate in politics: "For though we walk in
the flesh, we do not war after the flesh" (II
Corinthians 10:13).

Fourteen years later, Falwell co-founded the
Moral Majority, the first national effort to
stimulate fundamentalist political participation
and elect candidates who would, in the words of
co-founder Paul Weyrich, "Christianize America."

What explained this apparent sea change? While
fundamentalist Christians had long stayed out of
electoral politics, Falwell and many others were
"extremely unhappy with the 'rights' movements
that had sprung up in the '50s and '60s," says
Didi Herman, author of The Antigay Agenda.

"First black people, then women, now gay people?
The frustration had been mounting. Their actions
were catching up with their view."

Falwell was plain enough about his views; in
1964, he told a local paper that the Civil Rights
Act had been misnamed: "It should be considered
civil wrongs rather than civil rights." His "Old
Time Gospel Hour" TV program hosted prominent
segregationists like Govs. Lester Maddox of
Georgia and George Wallace of Alabama.

But Falwell, like other fundamentalists, worried
about "tainting" his religious message by mixing
it with politics.

The Rev. Mel White (see also A Thorn in Their
Side
<http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=525>),
an evangelical writer and filmmaker who
ghostwrote Falwell's autobiography, says Falwell
was led to politics in part by Dr. Francis
Schaeffer, a rebellious fundamentalist who had
begun spreading the word about "dominion
theology" and who many see as the father of the
anti-abortion movement.

Dubbed the "Guru of Fundamentalists" by Newsweek
in 1982, Schaeffer believed that Christians are
called to rule the U.S. — and the world — using
biblical law. That meant winning elections.

"Dr. Schaeffer," says White, "convinced Jerry
there was no biblical mandate against joining
with 'nonbelievers' in a political cause."

Schaeffer was admired by a radical group of
fundamentalist thinkers called Christian
Reconstructionists. Led by Orthodox Presbyterian
minister R.J. Rushdoony, the Reconstructionists
argued that the Second Coming couldn't occur
until the faithful established a "Biblical
kingdom."

Democracy, which Rushdoony called "the great love
of the failures and cowards of life," would be
replaced by strict Old Testament law — meaning
the death penalty for homosexuality, along with a
host of other "abominations," including heresy,
astrology, and (for women only) "unchastity
before marriage."

D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, like
James Dobson of Focus on the Family and other
Christian Right luminaries, unwaveringly preaches
"dominion Christianity" and hosts an annual
conference devoted to "Reclaiming America for
Christ."

Kennedy also is a longtime benefactor of former
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, known for the
Ten Commandments monument he installed in the
rotunda of that state's judicial building — and
for being thrown out of office after refusing to
obey federal court orders to remove it.

In 2002, Moore wrote a lengthy concurrence in a
custody case involving a lesbian mother. After
describing homosexuality as "abhorrent, immoral,
detestable, a crime against nature," Moore
asserted that "[t]he State carries the power of
the sword, that is, the power to prohibit
[homosexual] conduct with physical penalties,
such as confinement and even execution. It must
use that power to prevent the subversion of
children toward this lifestyle."


Fear Mongering to the Fore

While conservative Christians have led historic
crusades against a number of "evils" in America —
witchcraft, alcohol, communism, feminism,
abortion — gay sex was never more than a minor
concern until 1969, when protests in New York
City launched the contemporary gay-rights
movement.

In Where We Stand, Susan Fort Wiltshire recalls
some early stirrings of a new crusade: "Around
1970, ambitious small-town preachers in the
Northwest Texas Annual Conference of the United
Methodist Church began to exploit 'the gay
issue.' They saw that virulent anti-gay rhetoric
could fill football stadiums for revivals in such
tiny Panhandle towns as Tulia and Clarendon and
Higgins and Perryton."

The crusade went national in 1977, courtesy of
Anita Bryant. The perky spokesperson for
Coca-Cola, Tupperware and Florida orange juice,
Bryant had converted a runner-up finish in the
1959 Miss America pageant into a lucrative career
singing "wholesome family music."

Bryant later said she knew next to nothing about
gay people when she attended a 1977 revival at
Miami's Northside Baptist Church. The preacher
railed against a new ordinance in Dade County
that protected gay people from discrimination,
saying he'd "burn down his church before he would
let homosexuals teach in its school."

Bryant was so impressed by the dangers of this
new "homosexual agenda" that she launched an
initiative to overturn the anti-discrimination
ordinance, winning with a 70% vote.

Bryant then founded a national group called Save
Our Children and took her anti-gay message on the
road, helping fundamentalists organize anti-gay
ballot campaigns in the handful of American
cities that had passed gay rights laws. These
ballot initiatives would become the single most
important organizing tool for the fundamentalist
right, transforming thousands of previously
apolitical churchgoers into grassroots activists.


Save Our Children's primary tactic was fear
mongering. Gay people were "sick," "perverted,"
"twisted," and a threat to American families.

"Homosexuals cannot reproduce," Bryant often
said, "so they must recruit. And to freshen their
ranks they must recruit the youth of America."

Save Our Children distributed a press kit with a
paper titled, "Why Certain Sexual Deviations Are
Punishable By Death." Homosexuality was, of
course, among those deviations. So was "racial
mixing of human seed."

Save Our Children collapsed in 1979, after Bryant
had a well-publicized divorce and breakdown, but
not before her success in getting national
publicity and large donations caught the eye of
new-right strategists like Paul Weyrich and
Richard Viguerie, the pioneer of right-wing
direct-mail fundraising.

"Their other issues just weren't nearly as
popular," says Rob Boston, assistant
communications director of Americans United for
Separation of Church and State and author of
Close Encounters with the Religious Right.

"Most Americans supported abortion rights. Nobody
believed communism inside the U.S. was really a
threat. Slamming feminists, you risked alienating
half the population. But gay people? Anita Bryant
showed that gay-bashing could bring in some real
money."

Bryant had also outlined a new gay stereotype,
one far removed from the old cliché of
limp-wristed "fruits." Inspired by Bryant,
budding "family activist" Tim LaHaye painted a
full-blown portrait in his 1978 book, The Unhappy
Gays.

LaHaye, now famous for co-authoring the
blockbuster Left Behind series of
end-of-the-world thrillers, wrote that succumbing
to the demands of the gay-rights movement would
be a mistake of apocalyptic proportions —
literally.

"The mercy and grace of God seem to reach their
breaking point when homosexuality becomes
normal," LaHaye said. "Put another way, when
sodomy fills the national cup of man's
abominations to overflowing, God earmarks that
nation for destruction."

The cover of The Unhappy Gays featured a close-up
photograph of rusty chains, symbolizing the
"captivity" of homosexuality. "Moral fidelity
among homosexuals is almost unknown," LaHaye
wrote, citing as evidence "one psychologist
writer" (unnamed) who "suggests that is not
uncommon for a homosexual to 'have sex' with as
many as 2,000 different people in a lifetime."

This "incredible promiscuity" leads to a life of
lonely, selfish desperation, said LaHaye, but
there is hope: "Homosexuals are made, not born!"
and can be cured by being "born again."


Facts and Fiction

There was something missing from these dark
depictions of gay people and their "agenda":
evidence. It was one thing, after all, to claim
that homosexuals were child "recruiters,"
disease-ridden, and mentally unstable. It was
quite another to prove it.

Enter Paul Cameron. After losing his job teaching
psychology at the University of Nebraska, Cameron
set himself up as an independent sex researcher
in the late 1970s, churning out scores of
anti-gay pamphlets that were largely distributed
in fundamentalist churches.

Cameron's "studies" falsely concluded that gay
people were disproportionately responsible for
child molestation, for the majority of serial
killings, and for the spread of sexually
transmitted diseases. Gay people, according to
Cameron's research, were obsessed with consuming
human excrement, allowing them to spread deadly
diseases simply by shaking hands with
unsuspecting strangers or using public restrooms.


"Of all the vices," Cameron concluded in a
pamphlet called Medical Aspects of Homosexuality,
"only homosexuality constitutes a conspiracy
against society."

Cameron's brand of "science" echoed Nazi Germany.
"These themes of disease and seduction are
strongly reminiscent of older, anti-Semitic
discourse," writes Didi Herman in The Antigay
Agenda. "Jews historically were associated with
disease, filth, urban degeneration, and child
stealing."

When the AIDS crisis broke out in the early
1980s, Cameron claimed gay people had unleashed
"an octopus of infection spreading across the
world," and had done it on purpose. (Jerry
Falwell put it in simpler terms; he called AIDS
"the gay plague.")

In several newspaper and magazine exposés,
Cameron's studies were revealed to be anything
but scientific. In one particularly egregious
instance, Cameron published a 1983 study claiming
lesbians were 29 times more likely than
heterosexual women to intentionally infect their
sex partners with venereal diseases. It was later
discovered that Cameron's "scientific sample" for
this conclusion consisted of just seven women.

After being expelled from the American
Psychological Association in 1983 for violating
ethical standards in his anti-gay publications
Cameron began referring to himself as a
sociologist — until the American Sociological
Association passed a 1986 resolution declaring,
"Paul Cameron is not a sociologist, and [this
group] condemns his constant misrepresentation of
sociological research."

But despite the crackpot nature of Cameron's
theories and methodology, his "research" was
extolled by many in the religious right. In 1986,
Summit Ministries, a right-wing Christian group
in Colorado, distributed a booklet called Special
Report: AIDS, co-written by Cameron, Summit
leader David Noebel and Wayne Lutton (Lutton
would later be an editor for an anti-immigrant
hate group, the Social Contract Press, and act as
editorial advisor to the white supremacist
Council of Conservative Citizens).

Special Report argued for a drastic solution:
locking up "practicing homosexuals" in the name
of public health. After all, the authors wrote,
"During World War II we exiled Americans of
Japanese ancestry simply because we felt they
were a national threat during time of war."

Since AIDS has made gay people a "threat to our
national survival," they wrote, "We might well
prepare holding camps for all sexually active
homosexuals with special camps for homosexuals
with AIDS."

Right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan and William
Bennett, secretary of education in the Reagan
administration, were publicly embarrassed when
they touted Cameron's 1993 study claiming that
gay men have only a 42-year life expectancy. As
reporters soon discovered, Cameron had based the
study on obituaries printed in gay newspapers —
hardly a valid sample.

Even so, just like many of Cameron's other
"findings," the life-expectancy study continues
to be cited as an established fact by anti-gay
leaders like Focus on the Family's James Dobson,
whose grasp of the facts was called into question
earlier this year after Dobson warned that the
popular cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants,
who lives in a pineapple under the sea, was being
used by gay rights proponents to promote the
acceptance of homosexuality.

(Dobson made the comments at a Jan. 19 black-tie
dinner in Washington, D.C., where Focus on the
Family political allies, including several
members of Congress, celebrated last November's
election results. "The video itself is innocent
enough and does not mention anything overtly
sexual," Dobson wrote in a statement released
amidst the SpongeBob furor. "But while the video
is harmless on its own, I believe the agenda
behind it is sinister.")


Victory and Defeat

To the dismay of the anti-gay crusaders, polls
showed rising public support for gay rights
throughout the '80s and '90s. As a result, the
crusaders began to rethink their message. "They
finally started to realize the 'diseased pervert'
rhetoric wasn't going to win over the majority of
Americans," says Close Encounters with the
Religious Right author Rob Boston.

In Colorado Springs, home to more than 50
Christian Right organizations by 1991, a whole
new anti-gay strategy was being cooked up by
Colorado For Family Values, organizers of
Amendment 2, a statewide ballot initiative that
would overturn gay anti-discrimination laws that
had been passed by three Colorado towns and
prevent any such future protections from being
passed.

Realizing the old arguments weren't working, one
of Amendment 2's organizers, a born-again
"ex-hippie" attorney named Tony Marco, produced a
fresh argument: "special rights."

"What gives gay militants their enormous power
are money and the operative presumption that gays
represent some kind of 'oppressed minority,'"
Marco wrote. He recommended "demolishing the
presumption that gays are an 'oppressed
minority.'"

The best way to do that, Marco believed, was to
drum up resentment against gay people —
particularly among African Americans and
working-class whites — by portraying them as
wanting "special rights."

In a 1992 issue of Focus on the Family's Citizen
magazine, Marco began making an economic case
that gay people already had privileges that most
Americans could only dream of. "Homosexuals have
an average household income of $55,340," he
wrote, "versus $32,144 for the general population
and $12,166 for disadvantaged African-American
households."

Marco's numbers were grossly misleading and, like
Cameron's crackpot science, reminiscent of
anti-Semitic propaganda about Jews. His source
for gay income was a 1988 survey of gay magazine
readers — a skewed sample, The Antigay Agenda
author Didi Herman notes, because "readers of
glossy gay men's magazines are likely to be among
the most affluent members of the gay and lesbian
community."

Amendment 2 got a major boost in 1991, when James
Dobson began to push it on his daily radio show.
Dobson had moved his multimedia empire to a
campus in Colorado Springs that same year. Known
to most Americans as a soft-spoken purveyor of
homespun parenting advice, Dobson was now
displaying a much tougher side.

In 1990, Focus' Citizen magazine had published a
special issue, declaring the '90s "the Civil War
Decade." With the fall of Soviet communism,
Dobson wrote, the Cold War would be replaced by a
"culture war" fought on three fronts: abortion,
public education and homosexuality.

"Children are the prize to the winner of this
second civil war," wrote Dobson and his
Washington lobbyist, the Family Research
Council's Gary Bauer, in Children at Risk, also
published that same year. "We are to be
intolerant of evil," Dobson told his radio
audience in 1994. "Romans 12:9 says, 'Learn to be
sincere. Hate what is evil'" (Dobson's emphasis).


When Dobson began pushing Amendment 2, its
organizers had been struggling to get enough
signatures to qualify for the ballot. Overnight,
the campaign was flooded with volunteers and
money. Amendment 2 won by a 53%-47% margin.

The anti-gay movement had won a major round — in
the court of public opinion, at least. In 1996,
Amendment 2 was overturned by the u.s. Supreme
Court in Evans v. Romer. Justice Anthony
Kennedy's majority decision began with a pointed
reference to Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896
decision that allowed "separate but equal"
treatment of black people and ushered in the Jim
Crow era.

The Colorado amendment, Kennedy wrote, imposed a
"special disability" on gay men and lesbians, and
constituted "a bare ... desire to harm a
politically unpopular group."

But by then, the anti-gay movement had been
thoroughly energized. In 1994, in what The
Washington Times called "two days of top-secret
meetings," around 35 state and national anti-gay
leaders had convened in Colorado Springs.
Bringing "greetings from Dr. Dobson," Focus on
the Family's John Eldridge led things off by
presenting a five-point plan to spread the
anti-gay message.

"We must never appear to be mean-spirited or
bigoted," he said. But as he wound up his
exhortation, Eldridge sounded a different note.
"I would not say this in other cultural
contexts," he said, "but the gay agenda has all
the elements of that which is evil. It is
deceptive at every turn. It is destroying the
souls and lives of those who embrace it."


Calling Names

Old-school gay-bashing did not die away with the
rise of the "special rights" strategizing. If
anything, the rhetoric was ratcheted up in the
1990s, when President Bill Clinton's proposal to
lift the ban on gay military service inspired a
verbal arms race.

Gary Bauer took the lead, sprinkling his
fundraising appeals and Web-site columns with
references to gay people as "perverts" and
"weirdness on parade." On "The 700 Club," Pat
Robertson said Clinton's proposal would give
"preferred status to evil."

Jerry Falwell worried aloud that if the ban were
lifted, "our poor boys on the front lines will
have to face two different enemies, one from the
front and one from the rear."

Fundraising appeals became increasingly
outrageous. In January 1998, Christian Action
Network founder Martin Mawyer wrote:

"The title character in the ABC-TV sitcom Ellen
came out of the closet ... AND DUMPED HER FILTHY
LESBIAN LIFESTYLE RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF YOUR
LIVING ROOM!! IT'S THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY
OF NETWORK TV THAT THE LEAD CHARACTER IS A
SODOMITE!! ... Do you think TV ever portrays
homosexuals as they really are? Having sex with
hundreds of perverts in 'one-night stands' ...
spreading their filthy sex diseases to millions
of people ... molesting innocent children ...
flaunting their grotesque lifestyle ...
committing murder and sex crimes more than any
other group of people."

In July 1998, Pat Robertson warned the citizens
of Orlando, Fla., that if Disney World didn't
cancel "Gay Day," their city would be subject to
God's wrath, in the form of "terrorist bombs,
earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor."

That same July, D. James Kennedy's Center for
Reclaiming America, the Christian Coalition,
Focus on the Family and other anti-gay groups
launched a million-dollar ad campaign to promote
"ex-gay" ministries specializing in "curing"
lesbians and gay men of their sexual orientation
(see Curious Cures
<http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=327>).


The ex-gay campaign was partly designed to
reinforce the message that fundamentalists truly
"love the sinner but hate the sin." Ex-gay people
were also an essential part of the "special
rights" campaign, their existence cited as proof
that homosexuality was not genetic, but a matter
of choice.

Most of the ex-gay ministries promoted in the
campaign, including Focus on the Family's Exodus
International, practiced "reparative therapy," a
collection of methods that had long been
thoroughly discredited in the world of
psychology.

Still, the ex-gay ads made a splash. John and
Anne Paulk, the ex-gay Focus on the Family
employees who were featured in the campaign,
landed on the cover of Newsweek, which asked,
"Gay for Life?" A year later, John Paulk was
photographed hurrying out of Mr. P's, a gay bar
in Washington, D.C., joining dozens of other
ex-gay leaders who had suffered embarrassing
relapses.

Focus on the Family leaders quickly removed Paulk
as chairman of Exodus International despite his
protestations that he had "no sinful intentions"
in visiting Mr. P's.


'The Ultimate Ex-Gay'

On Oct. 6, 1998, one day before D. James
Kennedy's anti-gay coalition put out a second
round of ex-gay TV ads, 21-year-old college
student Matthew Shepard was savagely murdered in
Wyoming. Journalists jumped on the connection
between the ex-gay campaign and the prejudice
that fuels hate crimes.

"You call a group of people evil and sick and
immoral often enough and some nutcase out there
is going to act on it," wrote columnist Donald
Kaul in the Des Moines Register.

The Advocate, a gay newsmagazine, pointedly
called Shepard "the ultimate ex-gay."

A counter-attack was not long in coming. In an
Orlando Sun-Sentinel op-ed, Gary Bauer accused
the "militant homosexual lobby" of a "new
McCarthyism" with its claims that anti-gay
rhetoric leads to violence. Pat Buchanan agreed:
"The left is now using Mr. Shepard's murder both
to diabolize Christian teachings on homosexuality
and to impose on society its own moral code."

The Family Research Council, along with other
anti-gay groups, had often cited a similar fear
of being demonized as its rationale for opposing
hate-crime laws, asserting that hate crimes
legislation would lead to "thought crime"
prosecutions of Christians. In 1996, sparked by
the fact that Hawaii seemed to be close to
legalizing gay marriage, a related argument was
deployed — the idea that legalization ultimately
would lead to hate crimes prosecutions of
Christians who opposed homosexuality.

In January of that year, more than 20 anti-gay
groups, including Focus on the Family and the
Christian Coalition, sent representatives to a
church cellar in Memphis, Tenn., for the first
secret meeting of the National Pro-Family Forum.
The Forum, which continued to meet every three
months, scored a symbolic victory that fall, when
its members convinced Congress to pass the
Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), defining marriage
as the union of one man and one woman.

Writing in support of DOMA, Bauer predicted that
gay marriage would have dire consequences for
Americans of faith: "If they succeed, all
distinctions based on sex may fall, and the worst
aspects of the rejected Equal Rights Amendment
will be imposed. Homosexuals will gain the
'right' to adopt children; ... churches will be
pushed outside civil law; and government power
will be wielded against anyone who holds the
biblical view of homosexuality."


Forest Fire

After the Supreme Court legalized sodomy in 2003,
the gay marriage battle was on, with anti-gay
crusaders once again sharpening their knives of
dire rhetoric.

"Our great nation is under violent attack from
within," said Stephen Bennett, Christian singer
and ex-gay minister. "We are now at the 11th
hour, a point of no return."

"What's at stake here," said Family Research
Council president Tony Perkins, "is the very
foundation of our society, not only of America
but all Western civilization."

"I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to
marry," said the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart. "And I'm
gonna be blunt and plain: if one ever looks at me
like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he
died."

 >From the 2003 Texas sodomy decision until
Election Day 2004, the gay-marriage debate seemed
to bring out the warrior in everyone. The
anti-gay campaign, said Human Rights Campaign
Executive Director Cheryl Jacques, was marked by
"the highest level of intensity and aggression
ever."

In the 11 states where anti-gay marriage measures
were on the ballot, television ads urged voters
to "defend marriage." In Ohio, Phil Burress'
anti-gay group gathered 575,000 signatures in
fewer than 90 days to put their constitutional
amendment on the ballot. "It's a forest fire with
a 100-mile-per-hour wind behind it," Burress told
The New York Times.

Just five months after Lawrence vs. Texas, the
Pew Research Center found that opposition to gay
marriage had climbed from 53 to 59%. A new
majority of Americans, 55%, now characterized gay
sex as a sin. Thirty years of anti-gay crusades
had begun to pay.

As Election Day drew near, James Dobson was
taking no chances. His political spin-off group,
Focus on the Family Action, organized large
rallies in six cities last fall, attracting
crowds even Anita Bryant couldn't muster. Three
weeks before the election, about 150,000 turned
out for Dobson's "Mayday for Marriage" rally in
Washington, D.C.

On Oct. 22 in Oklahoma City, Dobson brought the
crowd to its feet with a message that Bryant
might have delivered in 1977. "Homosexuals are
not monogamous," he said. "They want to destroy
the institution of marriage. It will destroy
marriage. It will destroy the earth."

On Nov. 2, the anti-gay marriage amendments
passed handily in all 11 states — including Ohio,
the state that ultimately swung the election in
George W. Bush's favor. Many commentators argued
that the huge voter turnout in that pivotal
battleground state — and therefore George W.
Bush's victory — was due largely to the anti-gay
amendment driving conservative voters to the
polls in record numbers.

"Just a year ago, justices of the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex
couples have the legal right to marry. George W.
Bush is thanking them today," Boston Globe
columnist Joan Vennochi wrote November 4.

The week after the election, Burress called
anti-gay leaders together in Washington to start
planning for 10 state amendment campaigns in
2005, while other fundamentalist power brokers
made it clear to Bush as he prepared for his
second term that they expected some return for
their considerable investment, including his
unwavering support for an amendment to the United
States Constitution banning gay marriage
nationwide.

"In your re-election, God has graciously granted
America — though she doesn't deserve it — a
reprieve from paganism," wrote Bob Jones II,
President of Bob Jones University, in an open
letter of congratulations to President Bush.

"You have been given a mandate. We the people
expect your voice to be heard with the clear and
certain sound of a trumpet. Undoubtedly you will
have the opportunity to appoint many conservative
judges and exercise forceful leadership with the
Congress in passing legislation that is defined
by biblical norms regarding the family and
sexuality.

"You have four years to leave an imprint for
righteousness upon this nation that brings with
it the blessings of Almighty God."