Another Twist in the Twisted Attack on U.S. Colleges

September 22 2006
Counterbias.com
MEL SEESHOLTZ
 

Under the guise of promoting “diversity” and “academic freedom,” David Horowitz has been spearheading a McCarthy-like campaign against “liberal” professors on America’s college and universities campuses. Meanwhile, his FrontPageMag.com website features an ad for “Conservative T-Shirts.”

The “Diversity T-shirt” features four rows depicting eighteen handguns over the logo “Celebrate Diversity.” The word “diversity” is in yellow, except on the “alternative version” they had offered where it was in a rainbow of red, yellow and green. “Rainbows” are often associated with gay Americans’ struggle for equal civil rights. The tricolors of the Diversity T-shirt’s rainbow are often associated with African-Americans. Add the guns, and a very nasty message emerges.

Another twist in the twisted campaign against higher education has been added by Diane Gramley. She heads the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, an affiliate of Don Wildmon’s American Family Association. Ms. Gramley has suggested that universities not hire – and presumably fire en masse – gay professors.

The occasion for her comments was the arrest of University of Pennsylvania professor Lawrence Scott Ward for possession of child pornography. In Ms. Gramley’s “mind,” one professor’s wrong-doing warrants professorial genocide. Small minds think large when advocating an agenda of hate and discrimination.

No one sanctions child pornography or adults having sex with underage partners, including heterosexual female teachers who have sex with their underage male students. But just as Horowitz is not really interested in quality education, only his own agenda, Ms. Gramley was not condemning kiddie porn or having sex with underage partners. In keeping with the radical Christian Right’s agenda, she was stereotyping and condemning all gay Americans. In doing so she used the same intentional deception James Dobson did in his 2004 book Marriage Under Fire in order to stir the cauldron of hate and discrimination.

In justifying her “suggestion” Ms. Gramley cited Homosexualities by Alan Bell and Martin S. Weinberg. What she conveniently forgot to mention was that the Bell-Weinberg study was published twenty-eight years ago, in 1978, making it totally inappropriate and anachronistic in assessing society today.

Focus on the Family chairman James Dobson perpetrated the same deception in his book in which he asserted that “some studies say” that homosexuals “typically” have more than one thousand sex partners. The footnote attached to that assertion also referenced “A.P. Bell and M.S. Weinberg, Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 308-9; see also Bell, Weinberg & Hammersmith, Sexual Preference (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981).”

The title of the first text immediately suggests the deception: “Homosexualities” and “Diversity.” Dobson – like Gramley – made unqualified, blanket assertions about all homosexuals today based on one table in a book about “homosexualities” and the “diversity” of behaviors. Moreover, data over a quarter century old must be put into proper historical and cultural contexts, especially when dealing with a subject that has seen profound changes in the intervening decades.

Bell and Weinberg gathered their data in the mid 1970s, during the height of the so-called “bathhouse culture” when, as Andrew Sullivan noted in Virtually Normal, the homosexual subculture “all but submerged itself in a sexualized frenzy.” That “sexualized frenzy” ended rather abruptly when a mysterious retrovirus appeared and, in a matter of years, wiped out “a whole generation of homosexual men” while leaders of the Christian Right (such as Jerry Falwell) urged political leaders (such as Ronald Reagan) to do nothing about the epidemic. Rather, they called HIV/AIDS “God’s judgment” on gays. Worldwide that “judgment” afflicts far more heterosexual women and children than gay men.

But even during the days of the bathhouse culture, such statistics required qualification. A thousand different sex partners is a lot of people, especially when, demographically, the gay community makes up only 2-4 percent of the population and not all homosexuals live in a very large city where that many different partners would be even remotely possible. Therefore, those who did – in the 1970s – have a very large number of partners were a very small minority of a very small minority.

The pages in the Bell-Weinberg book (308-309) cited by Dobson contain tables. The one he alleged was “typical” of all homosexuals today appeared on page 308, in Appendix C. Apparently Dr. Dobson was interested only in gay men. The “White Homosexual Female” (WHF) and “Black Homosexual Female” (BHF) statistics clearly contradict his assertion.

Moreover, statistics from May 17, 2003 – the first day gay and lesbian Americans were allowed to legally marry in Massachusetts – further negate Dobson’s preposterous assertion in several ways:

• 50% of the same-sex couples who applied for marriage licenses had been together for at least a decade;

 

• The most predominant age group was 40 to 49 years-old; the median age was 43;

 

• 40% of those female couples said they had children in their households.

The second reference listed in Dobson’s citation – “Bell, Weinberg & Hammersmith, Sexual Preference (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981)” – is most perplexing since a theme in the book is “sexual orientation, whether it be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, does not appear to be something that one chooses. Recent studies suggest that sexual orientation has a genetic or biological component, and is probably determined before or shortly after birth.” This, of course, is all the more reason to destigmatize homosexuality. But that was not Dobson’s or Gramley’s desire, quite the contrary.

Clearly, Ms. Gramley’s intent was to demean and denigrate by suggesting all gays are inveterate pedophiles. The tactic is common among the leaders of the radically homophobic Christian Right. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition takes every opportunity to further pervert the bogus stereotype of gays as child molesters and use it in his campaigns of discrimination and what can only be called hate-mongering. (See “America’s New McCarthyism: Homosexual Stereotypes, Myths, and the Politics of Fear,” Popular Culture Review, 16:2 [August 2005], 83-115 for an analysis of Sheldon’s and the TVC’s use of twisted stereotypes.)

University of Chicago historian George Chauncey documented in Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality that the claim homosexuals recruit children and the stereotype of them as child molesters are relatively new and grew out of

the anxious years following the Second World War, when communists, criminal syndicates, and other half-invisible specters seemed to threaten the nation and when demonic new stereotypes of homosexuals were created and backed by government sanctions. … The old tropes of anti-Semitic rhetoric … were especially influential in shaping depictions of homosexuals. … And like Jews, they were depicted as a threat to children. In the most dangerous element of this new image, the escalation of antigay policing was accompanied, inspired, and justified by press and police campaigns that fomented stereotypes of homosexuals as child molesters.

The linking of Jews and child molestation dates from the early medieval period in Europe. By the late Middle Ages, it was “common knowledge” as portrayed in the tale Chaucer’s Prioress told on the way to Canterbury.

Anti-Semitism has a long history in America as well. It seems less than coincidental that the two Americans executed for treason during the McCarthy era – when the U.S. State Department fired more homosexuals than Communists – were Jewish. Homosexuals were a “natural” addition to Jews and Communists especially since they were defined primarily by their sexuality, an uncomfortable topic rarely openly discussed in post-WWII Christian America.

Truth is, there are mentally ill heterosexuals who are child molesters and there are mentally ill homosexuals who are child molesters. Nevertheless, many leaders of the radical Christian Right persist in portraying all gays as crazed pedophiles and molesters. But as Kathryn Conroy, assistant dean of Columbia University’s School of Social Work, pointed out in a New York Times letter following the Vatican’s ban on gay priests: “Reliable studies show that pedophiles … are overwhelmingly heterosexual. In fact, homosexuals are statistically underrepresented as those who sexually abuse children” [italics added].

Those are not new facts, except perhaps for Ms. Gramley and her ill-informed, purposely misleading brethren. In defining “pedophilia” and “pedophile,” the Oxford English Dictionary offers the following citations:

1926 Med. Jrnl. & Rec. CXXIV. 161/1 One must keep clearly in mind in dealing with pedophilia the distinction between that [and] homosexuality…

 

1960 Spectator 8 July 69 The…survey…shows the paedophiliac to be a type altogether distinct from the adult-seeking homosexual.

Clearly, pedophiles should not have ready access to children. But Ms. Gramley’s singling out gays when, as Dr. Conroy pointed out “pedophiles … are overwhelmingly heterosexual,” amounts to pure bigotry and yet another example of the radical Christian Right’s malicious efforts to demean, denigrate, and hurt gay Americans in any way possible.

In their advocacy of discrimination against fellow citizens, their children and their families, Gramley, Wildmon, Dobson, and Sheldon have a new ally.

“Americans for Truth.” Sounds like a noble organization, doesn’t it? Nothing could be further from the truth. AFT exists solely to thwart any and all efforts to recognize the civil, legal, social, or economic equality of gay and lesbian Americans, their children, and their families.

According to AFT’s founder and president Peter LaBarbera, AFT is dedicated to “educating citizens on the threat that the powerful and well-funded ‘GLBT’ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) movement poses to children, marriage and freedom.” Mr. LaBarbera further states that AFT’s “goal is to become a leading resource for Americans seeking to confront the homosexual agenda,” in the name of “God,” of course: “We will operate in a spirit of love and truth commanded by God.”

How does one try to hurt people, their children and their families “in a spirit of love and truth”?

The “homosexual agenda” Mr. LaBarbera so fears was plainly stated by Rep. Barney Frank at the 2004 Democratic National Convention:

Specifically, we want all people in the United States to enjoy the same legal rights as everyone else, unless they have forfeited them by violating the rights of others. We believe this should include some things that are, apparently, very controversial.

 

They include the right to serve, fight, and even die on behalf of our country in the military; the right to earn a living by working hard and being judged wholly on the quality of our work; the right for teenagers to attend high school without being shoved, punched, or otherwise attacked; and, yes, the right to express not only love for another person but a willingness to be legally as well as morally responsible for his or her well-being.

Does anyone really believe Divinity would have a problem with such an “agenda”?

Horowitz’s campaign has already faltered as his antics and lack of credible evidence become increasingly publicized. Gibson Armstrong, the Republican Pennsylvania legislator who proposed a resolution based on Horowitz’s campaign, said he had fifty examples of “intolerance” directed at conservative and/or fundamentalist college students. Intolerance has no place in the open pursuit of knowledge – a lesson the Christian Right and their allies desperately need to learn – but fifty alleged examples is hardly an avalanche, given the numbers. As of fall 2004, the state reported 660,566 students enrolled in Pennsylvania colleges and universities.

Rep. Armstrong called for hearing on the alleged “liberal bias” of professors at Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities. The hearings – the first of their kind in any state that has considered Horowitz’s program – were held at Temple University in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the much hyped event in a story titled “Hearing into bias falls short of billing”:

Yesterdays [January 9, 2005] hearing on academic freedom at Pennsylvania’s public universities was hyped by conservative activists as a “historic moment,” in which school administrators would finally be “called to account” in front of state legislators for allowing student “indoctrination and abuse” by leftist professors.  But the hearing at Temple University did not live up to that billing.

Only two students showed up, one “acknowledged he had never filed a formal grievance. And Temple president David Adamany testified that in fact no student had made an official classroom bias complaint in at least five years, despite well-developed policies and procedures for doing so.” A National Guard veteran – presumably not from Temple – also testified. He said that his professors had exhibited anti-military bias.

“Just as in the 1950s, right-wing forces are attempting to impose political tests on the faculty,” said Rachel DuPlessis, a Temple English professor. Some Pennsylvania lawmakers also had some things to say. Rep. Dan Frankel said that “for us to pretend there is widespread abuse going on is problematic.” Rep. Dan Surra called the hearings a “colossal waste of time and taxpayer money.”

Bill Toland of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Harrisburg Bureau was correct: “critics of proposals like these say political conservatives, emboldened by election successes over the past decade, are making a thinly veiled charge at the last bastion of liberalism – college campuses – armed with flimsy evidence and in search of a problem that doesn’t really exist.”

An isolated event and “a problem that doesn’t exist” are precisely what Ms. Gramley used in her call to bigotry and discrimination against homosexual professors. It backfired. More and more Americans are seeing through the Christian Right’s anti-gay rhetoric and smelling the putrefied bigotry and hate beneath.

---