Civil Unions, Civil Rights, and Genetic Cleansing

March 23 2007
Counterbias.com
MEL SEESHOLTZ
 

Fact: Gay and lesbian Americans form lasting monogamous relationships.

Fact: Those relationships create families.

Fact: Those families often include children.

Fact: Some so-called “pro-family” advocates are willing to hurt children and their parents in order to advance a self-serving socio-political agenda.

No one personifies that destructive, anti-family, self-aggrandizing deception more than Louis P. Sheldon, founder and chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition. He demonstrated that yet again with his March 6, 2007 invective. It seems Chairman Sheldon is outraged by the Alliance for Marriage, whose motto is “More Children Raised in a Home with a Mother and Father.” While the Alliance wishes to “protect marriage” and reserve it for heterosexuals only, they have the common sense and grasp of reality to recognize the facts listed above.

Facts and reality are anathema to Sheldon and his TVC. Their unbridled hatred – and “hatred” is the only appropriate word – for gay and lesbian Americans is legendary and a deep, damning, betraying stain on both Christianity and America’s promise of civility equality for all.

Sheldon denounced the Alliance for Marriage because they “talk about the [civil] ‘right’ to civil unions.” The condemnation is not surprising. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Rev. Sheldon argued against giving aid to the surviving members of gay and lesbian partnerships, even when those shattered families included children. Is that what a “moral” man would do after such a horrible tragedy?

Is it moral to encourage intolerance and hate? Is it moral to oppose programs that would help men, women and children afflicted with HIV/AIDS? Is it moral to advocate discrimination? Is it moral to suggest putting some people in concentration camps? Is it moral to oppose programs and legislation that would benefit children currently being reared by same-sex parents? Is it moral to sponsor and support legislation specifically designed to hurt those same families?

Sheldon is guilty of all the above. Is this a “moral” man?

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

– Martin Luther King Jr.

In his diatribe against the Alliance for Marriage Rev. Sheldon further exposed himself: “throwing homosexual marriage extremists a bone like civil unions does not keep them from attacking marriage.”

Aside from the absurdity of calling those who are fighting for the right to marry “marriage extremists” hell-bent on “attacking marriage,” Lucky Louie Sheldon’s expression “throwing … a bone like civil unions” clearly demonstrated what he thinks of gay and lesbian Americans: they’re “dogs.” Apparently Sheldon took a lesson from another theofascist dictator determined to increase his socio-political power at the expense of fellow citizens:

“Worse than dogs and pigs” is how Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe described homosexuals almost a decade ago, when the gay community attempted to highlight widespread homophobia in the Southern African country.

Isn’t it time for all Americans – despite, or because of their differences – to stand up and say “Enough!” to Sheldon and the rest of the fanatical leaders of the Christian Right who use gays and lesbians as fodder for their immoral, self-serving political agendas?

When will they – and we – learn? History flows inexorably against the bigotry advocated by anachronisms such as Sheldon and his perverted values coalition. He and the TVC do, however, have allies in twisting religion in order to advocate new ways to demean, denigrate – and eradicate – gay and lesbian Americans, even before they’re born.

On March 2, 2007, Rev. R. Albert Mohler, the ninth president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, published an article titled “Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?”

Mohler implicitly acknowledged that sexual orientation has a genetic component and/or is hormonally determined prior to birth. But he looks forward to the day when medical science can change that:

If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin…

In Mohler’s twisted thinking homosexuality is God’s punishment – selectively applied – for “original sin.” Now, he wants to use the sciences of genetic engineering and hormone therapy to repent for the “sin” of Adam and Eve.

Myth and science are not good bedfellows: if God created only Adam and Eve then, using Mohler’s literal reading of Genesis, brothers and sisters must have procreated with each other. Not a good idea, genetically speaking. Meanwhile, science has dismissed – absolutely – the possibility that the same two people could possibly have provided the genetic diversity necessary to account for Earth’s human population.

Moreover, biblical literalists have repeatedly argued against any pre-natal meddling with a fetus, claiming that whatever the fetus was, was its God-given birthright. Funny how that thinking changes so radically when it comes to gay people. Mohler’s “genetic cleansing” proposal is nothing less than a twenty-first century theofascist program of eugenics.

The twisted “logic” that supports hypocrisy and hate becomes even more sinister when cloaked in religious rhetoric. As Rev. John Shelby Spong noted, society gives “wide berth to obvious pathology when it is covered by religious language.” Sheldon’s attack on civil rights and Mohler’s suggestion of “genetic cleansing” are just the latest examples.

But it’s just not the lives of existing and future gays Rev. Mohler wants to control. He wants to micro-manage everyone’s life according to his biblical literalism: “Scripture does not give [heterosexual] couples the option of choosing childlessness.” Mohler wants “the church” to enforce marriage even when it’s against an individual’s wishes and to enforce procreation even when it’s against a couple’s wishes: “The church should insist that the biblical formula is: Adulthood means marriage, and marriage means children.”

Rev. Mohler expanded on his views in an article about “Married Couples Who Won’t Have Children”:

Modern Americans are determined not only to liberate sex from marriage, and not only to separate sex from the realities of male and female, but to liberate sex from procreation.

 

This rebellion against parenthood is nothing less than an absolute revolt against God’s design. The Scripture points to barrenness as a great curse and children as a divine gift. …

 

“Make love, not babies” expresses a worldview the Scripture rejects. Marriage, sex, and children are part of one package. To deny any part of this wholeness is to reject God’s intention in creation—and his mandate revealed in the Bible. You can’t make love (though you can have sex) if you refuse to make babies.

Like Lou Sheldon, James Dobson, Don Wildmon, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and the rest of the self-appointed spokesmen for God, Rev. Mohler claims to know how everyone should be and how everyone should live. Is there any greater arrogance than that? Can there be any greater threat to individuals’ civil rights in a secular state? Can there be any greater reason to keep church and state as separate as possible?
 

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