Time for LGBT Leaders to Apologize, Resign, and Be Replaced

There is a gay advocacy establishment. It is very powerful. Organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, Lambda Legal, and Stonewall (in the U.K.) coordinate efforts with the gay rights contingents at places such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, and countless university administrative divisions. An army of writers like Dan Savage, Signorile at Huffington Post, Stern at Slate, Carlos Maza at Media Matters, Zack Ford at ThinkProgress, and Sally Kohn have spearheaded a massive public relations operation devoted to advancing whatever they viewed, rightly or wrongly, as "LGBT interests." As of the early hours of June 12, 2016, as fifty people lay dead at an Orlando nightclub, this enormous and well funded cadre has been revealed as completely tone-deaf and incompetent. They have been chasing after easy targets like ex-gays, orthodox Christians, "bullies," family values proponents, and Republicans for decades. The underlying premise of their movement has been that the greatest dangers faced by gays stem from "hate" and "stigma" propagated by these supposedly intolerant "bigots" housed in conservative quarters. Much of their lavish treasury was earned by shaking down corporations and private donors by scaring them about monolithic Christian intolerance and promising that they were the ideal people to fight for "gay rights" against their biggest threat: people who think homosexuality is a choice, those who read Leviticus, proponents of traditional marriage, and opponents of transgender bathrooms.

The two most important causes célèbres of this hyper-powerful lobby were Matthew Shepard, who was murdered in 1998, and Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide in 2010. The fact that Matthew Shepard's murder was likely not, upon further investigation, motivated by homophobia (his two killers were both in relationships with girlfriends raised by gay parents) has not deterred the lobby from using Shepard's death as the template for what they are to fight: rural uneducated Christian Neanderthals who do not subscribe to Bravo. The fact that Tyler Clementi's suicide – however important was the fact that an embarrassing video was wrongfully posted online by his roommate – may have been largely influenced by the turbulence resulting from his having sex with much older men he didn't know, whom he met over the internet, has not deterred the lobby from talking about adolescent teasing as if it were the moral equivalent of terrorism. There are many watch lists compiled by the gay lobby. I am on several of them because I am supposedly a danger to LGBT people everywhere. I am on GLAAD's Commentator Accountability Project, one of the most slanderous enterprises in recent memory. The Human Rights Campaign, not to be undone, lists me on its top-twelve "Exporters of Hate" internationally. I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman and that children should be raised by their mother and father. I am a Christian who believes that sodomy as a sin, so I choose to live a chaste life and not engage in sodomy. That's it, folks! I am not the only one. From Anita Bryant to Scott Lively, the gay lobby has trafficked in hysteria about the mortal threat posed to LGBTs by people who have Christian beliefs, do not approve of sodomy, and think families based on a mother and father with children are for the best. All those billions of dollars in petty lawsuits, phony shock ads, blacklists, watchdog groups, and sensational legislation, and for what? There is still AIDS. Domestic violence and sexual assault plague the gay community. There is rampant exploitation ranging from prostitution to human trafficking, inflicting the greatest toll not on the wealthy commentator class, but on the masses of poor gays who have yet to see a drastic improvement in their lives after thirty years of the gay lobby claiming to fight for them. They can sign up for the military and be denied a loophole to leave if they get outed and raped in their unit. Wow! That's progress! All the safety nets and firewalls failed on June 12, as the real threat showed itself: terrorism, for which there is no moral equivalent. Ideally, there would be hundreds of weeping resignations from all the gay "leaders" who oversaw a disastrous lapse in judgment. After all, if George W. Bush can be excoriated for failing to stop 9/11, then these folks need to be excoriated and then some. Bush had to worry about all the world's security. The gay lobby was tasked only to look after about 1.7% of the United States population. The gay lobby wasted the gay community's time and their donors' money. They need to go. It is no coincidence that this high death toll happened on Latin night at a gay club in Orlando. The poor are sacrificed in the gay community. This was no exception. When I saw that I was not the right person to be teaching American literature at a far-left university, I quit. Will the cosseted leaders of the gay lobby have the same will to do what is right? Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif, Soundcloud, Twitter, and Facebook.