As long as we accept the gay agenda’s Orwellian definition of equality, the list of sponsors for Gay Pride Festival will be a mile long, while pro-family groups will remain unsupported, underfunded, and flying by the seat of their pants.

While anti-gender activists continue to push for the redefinition of marriage in the courts, they have already won a key victory: the redefinition of equality. The gay community has aggressively pursued and claimed equality for themselves. But why? In order to significantly advance their cause they needed to stake a claim on a universally appealing idea, apply that idea like a bumper sticker to their cause, and then let the appeal of the hijacked idea produce instant converts. “Equality” fits this formula perfectly, and it has worked like a charm.

In case you have missed it, here are three recent examples of what the new “equality” looks like.

Under the new equality, if you are working to publicize a major event in Utah about the importance of family and marriage and you apply for donated billboard space (like my organization did) you’re out of luck. We were told our advertising was potentially too “controversial” and therefore did not qualify for nonprofit donation status. The text for the billboard read: “Stand for the Family Conference. September 18 & 19. Stand4Family.org. Tickets online.” This apparently controversial text disqualified the ad from consideration.

Under the new equality, if you are seeking funding for a major pro-family event in Utah and you ask a respected and longstanding Utah business to sponsor your event (like we did), you’re out of luck. This business told us that they marched in the Gay Pride Parade in Salt Lake City because of the responsibility they feel to “help strengthen communities of Utah,” to “ensure equality,” and because they “value diversity.” (Notice the refashioned buzz words they dutifully parrot.)

But they declined our request to sponsor the Stand for the Family Conference. One is left to wonder why. Perhaps this good business is simply overwhelmed with requests to support noble causes, as they indicated to us. And yet, under these selective circumstances, they chose to participate in the Gay Pride Parade alongside males gyrating in Speedos, girls in cages, and hairy middle-aged men sporting female anatomy made from wads of newspaper. Why? Because to do so means they support the magical idea of equality.

Under the new equality, if you produce a documentary called "Understanding Same-sex Attraction" featuring the true and unvarnished stories of four men who lived and then left the homosexual lifestyle and post it on a major video-sharing website (like we did), you’re out of luck. The website disabled our account stating that it has a policy against “anti-diversity messages” and does not allow “discriminatory speech.”

What this means is that the life stories of these four men have been deemed “discriminatory.” These men are not allowed to talk about their own lives publicly because the gay agenda doesn’t want them to. It has a corner on the definitions of equality and diversity, and ironically these definitions do not allow equal expression of diverse viewpoints on sexuality.

Gay activists are pleased with this one-sided turn of events; it’s going exactly as they planned. They purposely refashioned equality in the public mind making it synonymous with all things gay, while still retaining the appeal of its old definition of fairness and justice. They’ve structured it so that corporations, individuals, courts and churches would be scrambling to line up in the new “equality” camp, and that those who still “hatefully” maintain that children need fathers and mothers would linger between camps afraid to lift a hand or a wallet in favor of the family for fear someone will call them anti-equality, anti-kind, and downright anti-American.

As long as we accept the gay agenda’s Orwellian definition of equality, the list of sponsors for Gay Pride Festival will be a mile long, while pro-family groups will remain unsupported, underfunded, and flying by the seat of their pants. Make no mistake, the new equality only allows for same-sex opinions in the public square. Under this tyrannical version of equality there is one pervasive voice preaching the distorted virtues of a high-risk sexual lifestyle. And there is no voice for the family.

Gay marriage activists’ attempts to choke out equal expression of opinions on marriage and sexuality and to judicially dodge the voice of the people on these subjects may reveal something significant about how they really feel about equality: they fundamentally fear it. They do not desire the free and equal exchange of ideas about marriage and family, nor do they trust the equalizing power of the vote. That’s why they had to harness equality, reframe its core meaning, and send it back out into the world utterly changed to accomplish their purposes — exactly as they plan to do with marriage itself.

Kimberly Ells is the president of Family Watch International, Utah Chapter. Contact her at kim@familywatchinternational.org.