Robert Oscar Lopez writes this week that Christmas can be a very difficult time for anti-gay activists like himself, since he often feels like no one is understands or even wants to talk about his staunch opposition to LGBT equality.

“At Christmastime, those of us who can see the truth about these gay issues face multiple conflicts,” Lopez laments. “The LGBT lobby has been ruthless about intruding into all our relationships both personal and professional to indoctrinate people in its sexual ideology.”

He is upset that he spends Christmas with people who apparently don’t care for his vitriolic rants about how gay people “destroy” themselves and society.

“Why does it have to be so hard,” Lopez wonders, to talk about the “crimes” of the gay community?

In fact, why not follow Lopez advice by giving a friend for Christmas one of Lopez’s self-published gay erotic novels? It will surely be a conversation starter.

(HT: RWW reader Matthew Briol)

Every Christmas, I am reminded of how insufficient our Christ-centered holidays are. On Bill O’Reilly’s show we get consternation about a “war on Christmas.” Many FOX News viewers worry about the tireless push by secularists to turn the day into a December recess between World AIDS Day and Anderson Cooper watching the ball drop in Times Square. But what if public venues acknowledged that the holiday was about the birth of Jesus? Would we be closer to His truth?

…

Bearing witness does not mean always confronting the LGBT lobby. Certainly there are plentiful abusers who are heterosexual to be taken to task.

But my burden is unique: it is the gay world whose crimes I saw, and that world that I must face with a sense of compassion for the vulnerable among us who might be crushed by its callousness.

Why does it have to be so hard?

…

At Christmastime, those of us who can see the truth about these gay issues face multiple conflicts. The world believes that we are full of what Anthony Kennedy calls “animus.” We are increasingly pathologized as haters or else criminalized as the purveyors of discrimination. Our politicians surrendered us for thirty pieces of silver from the Human Rights Campaign and Paul Singer long ago, while religious leaders either cave, as did most Methodists and reform Jews, or else cut ties to us to save themselves the bother, as have many Catholic and Anglican leaders.

The LGBT lobby has been ruthless about intruding into all our relationships both personal and professional to indoctrinate people in its sexual ideology. It doesn’t matter that this ideology of biological determinism and sexual abandon destroys gays themselves, as well as the people around them who feel the fallout from their depression, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders, anxiety, exploitation, sexual assault, domestic violence, and suicide — all the trademarks of a gay world that has been decaying from within while its self-appointed lobbyist overseers bicker with the outside world about same-sex marriage.

The more resources the LGBT lobby has shifted from reforming gay culture to erecting a façade of suburban marital normalcy that precious few gays can ever really obtain, the gloomier and unhappier gay people have become as individuals.

Yet to bear witness on this topic is relentlessly painful. The LGBT lobby has warped my relationship with students, my relationship with gay friends, my relationship with the press, my relationship with bosses at the university, my relationship with readers, and saddest of all, my relationship with my own family. My relatives, all well-intended liberal devotees of the New York Times, will believe what Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd writes about gays before they believe me, their own brother. Of the large brood fostered by our sprawling family tree, only I knew of my mother’s sexuality from early on and viewed her partner as a second mother; not coincidentally, only I ended up coming out as queer and living a queer life.

“Let’s agree to disagree,” they say, when the topic of Governor Brown’s signing a ban on ex-gay therapy comes up. “That’s how you see it, but not necessarily how it is,” they say, when I tell them about the epidemic of homosexual rape in the military, something I witnessed firsthand because I was the only one who served in the armed forces. “My gay friends tell a different story,” they say, when I try to open up about what really happened between 1984, when I was first introduced to gay sex at the age of thirteen, and 1999, when I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife. “You’ve always been one to exaggerate.” And at last, on the issue of our own mother, “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this.”

To bear witness and speak honestly means, sometimes, having to feel pain at the hands of people you love. In a time of chocolate cookies, fireplace stockings, and wrapping paper, I wish that John 5:13 didn’t remind me that these are among the things that God expects us to surrender if it means we must speak a truth that others do not want to hear.