The brouhaha over Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy’s defense of authentic marriage has caused a fender-bender on the political left. Classic free-speech liberalism has apparently met for the first time the new generation of homo-fascists. Heady with empowerment by President Obama and a long string of political and legal victories, the “gay” activist movement and its homosexualist allies are flexing their muscles like never before. Two such allies, Mayors Tom Merino of Boston and Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, announced plans to use the powers of their respective offices to prevent Chick-fil-A from expanding its business in these two cities. Their blatant disregard for the First Amendment was so egregious that it apparently shocked a number of classic liberals into action.
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald chided his fellow travelers on the left in a column titled “Rahm Emanuel’s Dangerous Free Speech Attack,” remarking “You can’t cheer when political officials punish the expression of views you dislike and then expect to be taken seriously when you wrap yourself in the banner of free speech in order to protest state punishment of views you like and share.” He listed a number of other liberal journalists and groups like the ACLU who had also gone public with their criticism.
Welcome to the brave new world of homo-fascism, Mr. Greenwald, but watch your back. You’re now officially a “homophobe” because you have dared to oppose something that is favorable to the “gay” cause. Sure, you tried to cover your backside by tossing in a couple of cheap shots at the “chicken CEO” but that won’t save you from the brownshirts. They don’t really care about free speech. They care about power. Indeed, if you had been paying attention over the past few years, you would have noticed that their official position is that “anti-gay bigots” don’t deserve free speech at all.
Perhaps you are unaware of the “Commentator Accountability Project” of the powerful Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLADD). It was launched earlier this year to hold media outlets (not commentators) accountable for allowing traditional marriage advocates (including this writer) to have a voice in the public debate.
One of its key concepts for twisting the arms of journalists is the slogan “bias is not balance.” How’s that for simply redefining pro-family opinion out of existence in the newsroom? I personally recall a leader of the Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association years ago state that allowing pro-family people to comment in news stories related to homosexuality was equivalent to letting the Ku Klux Klan have equal time in stories about race.
But surely, Mr. Greenwald, you are not unaware of the many incidents of “gay” bullying of Christians in recent years, from the celebrity-level character assassination of beauty queen Carrie Prejean (for saying nothing more than that marriage should be between a man and a woman), to the recent bashing of Brad Pitt’s mom for giving her opinion that homosexuality is wrong in a letter to her local newspaper. Reportedly, death threats have since intimidated her into silence. Last year, just outside of Rahm’s Chicago in Arlington Heights, a church school that hosted me for a talk on the biblical view of homosexuality was vandalized when a chunk of pavement was thrown through a window. On it was written the message “Shut Down Lively” and a note was attached threatening future violence. Come to mention it, though, you wouldn’t have known about this hate crime because it got almost no press coverage, even locally. I wonder why?
True, these examples are not precisely equivalent to the case of public officials abusing their offices to punish pro-family speech, but they do share in common an implicit belief that all disapproval of homosexuality must be suppressed. And that the urgency of this goal trumps all other considerations.
Unfortunately for all of us, there will be many more examples of homo-fascism in our future, because the “gay” movement is finally within reach at a national level of the power it needs to punish its most vocal detractors and intimidate everyone else into silence. This will include “classic liberals” like yourself, Mr. Greenwald, a fact you will discover the hard way if you dare to continue as a defender of “repellant” pro-family speech. I pray you have the backbone to match your principles. And while you’re at it, being also a civil-rights lawyer, perhaps you might weigh in on the ethics of a lesbian judicial activist sitting as presiding judge in the Illinois “gay marriage” case. Rahm Emanuel’s power to unconstitutionally impose his “morality” on the people of that state pales in comparison to hers.
Don’t get me wrong; I genuinely appreciate that some of you classic liberals have jumped to the defense of Dan Cathy’s free-speech rights. Forgive me for my skepticism of your motives, however, in light of all the other examples of “gay” bullying that have largely gone unchallenged by you all. One can’t help but wonder if the “danger” you sense is not actually to the First Amendment, but to the “gay” agenda itself, by the prospect of a too-early awakening of the sleeping giant of American public opinion. The frog must not be prompted to jump out of the pot by a too-sudden rise in heat.
So, along with the rest of the pro-family movement, I will wait to see whether you and your colleagues continue to stand up to the “gay” bullies, in which case we will know you’re for real, or whether you step aside and let them goose step on toward their glorious vision of a society purged of Judeo-Christian sexual morality.
Dr. Scott Lively is the founder and president of Defend the Family International and has been since 1997. An attorney, pastor and human-rights consultant, he has promoted and defended the biblical view of marriage and family in more than 30 countries. The author of five books, including “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party” (with Orthodox Jewish co-author Kevin Abrams) and “Redeeming the Rainbow: A Christian Response to the ‘Gay’ Agenda,” Dr. Lively is currently based in Springfield, Mass., where he and his wife run an inner-city mission church they founded in 2008. He holds a Juris Doctor of law (J.D.) from Trinity Law School and a Doctor of Theology (Th.D.) from the Pentecostal Assemblies of God School of Bible Theology, as well as a Certificate in International Human Rights, from the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasburg, France.
