EDITOR’S NOTE: With the U.S. economy on life support, record numbers of illegal aliens invading the nation, and ISIS targeting the American homeland with mass-casualty attacks, the Obama administration has made transgender rights – which Vice President Joe Biden calls “the civil rights issue of our time” – an urgent focus of its final months.
However, spurred on by reports of an 8-year-old girl being strangled unconscious by a 33-year-old man in a girls’ restroom Friday, Americans are pushing back. Obama’s just-announced school edict mandating transgender bathrooms for the entire nation’s children is being met with fierce resistance. Target Corporation’s stock value plunged after more than a million Americans publicly pledged to boycott the store over its bathroom policy, and North Carolina is now suing the federal government for its “bullying,” “overreaching” attack on that state’s new bathroom law.
Indeed, millions of Americans, including many otherwise sympathetic to gay rights, are now openly rebelling against strong-armed, illegal – and arguably insane – governmental mandates that boys and men must be allowed to use girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms and showers if they personally “identify” as women. Children are even being sent to special transgender camps now, to encourage and facilitate their eventual “transition.”
The big question: Why is all this happening?
In his widely acclaimed new book, “The Snapping of the American Mind,” award-winning journalist David Kupelian stunningly documents – in a chapter titled “Gender Madness” – precisely what the transgender phenomenon is really all about. Prepare to be shocked. With the issue growing exponentially, and personally impacting more and more Americans, WND has decided to publish the entire chapter here, as many reviewers consider it the clearest, most revealing explanation yet of the issue.
“When I looked in the mirror, I just saw disgusting fat.”
Those words, spoken by a dangerously skinny teenager named Emma Stewart, are typical of girls suffering from anorexia nervosa.
“I was convinced I needed to be skinny to look good in a bikini,” Emma told the U.K.’s Daily Mirror. “I started obsessing about my weight and what I’d look like sunbathing. I was convinced I was too heavy, so I started skipping meals and making myself sick …”
Emma, literally wasting away as shocking photos document, resembled an emaciated concentration-camp survivor. And yet, the effect her anorexia had on her mind and emotions was to make her see herself as disgustingly fat.
Emma’s delusion is far from unusual. Between half and 1 percent of all American girls – that’s hundreds of thousands of young women – suffer from anorexia nervosa, a key symptom of which is experiencing strong feelings of being fat, while in reality being skinny. Or, as the National Eating Disorders Association puts it, making “frequent comments about feeling ‘fat’ or overweight despite weight loss.”
Hold that thought. Now let’s look into the mirror of people suffering from another condition, one increasingly fawned over by the news and entertainment media, honored as “the next civil rights movement” and legitimized through passage of special laws all over the country – namely, gender dysphoria. That’s the new name for what used to be called gender identity disorder, referring to the plight of transgender (or transsexual) people who so strongly identify with the opposite sex that they often undergo major surgery in an attempt to change genders.
“When I look in the mirror in the morning, before having shaved, it’s certainly a painful experience. … The immediate reaction I get from my reflection is a feeling of very strong disassociation, accompanied by a kind of shock, confusion, or mental jarring. I have the strong, gut-level sensation that whoever is behind the mirror is not me,” says one “trans” individual.
“Whenever I look in the mirror it’s like I’m looking at a stranger or something,” says another.
“Transsexuals,” explains one commentator, “report feeling out of place, feeling awkward, and to get others to understand their inner struggle, transsexuals will ask: ‘If you’re a woman, imagine that every morning when you awaken and look in the mirror, you see a man. And if you’re a man, imagine that when you awaken, you see a woman in the mirror. That’s how a transsexual feels.’”
Increasingly, Americans are being inundated with sympathetic, media-driven stories showcasing this unfortunate and perplexing condition, like ABC’s two-hour primetime interview with reality TV star Bruce Jenner, during which the legendary Olympic champion told a nation and world that have long revered his masculine athleticism: “I am a woman.”
Sign the petition demanding an end to the madness! No men in girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms or showers! Just say no!
‘Why would your brain lie?’
The human mind is an amazing thing. Just like computers, they’re awesome when they work properly, but vexing when they don’t.
Yet there it is: Whether it’s the anorexic or transgender individual staring intently into the mirror and seeing the exact opposite of reality, or millions of others in similar straits tormented from within with myriad obsessions, compulsions, addictions, and delusions, our minds and emotions are – very simply – capable of lying to us, to the point of seriously disrupting our lives.
Take OCD, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, which currently afflicts one in 100 American adults (between 2 and 3 million), plus one in 200 children and teens (that’s another 500,000), according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
Here, courtesy of the International OCD Foundation, is a vivid description of what obsessive-compulsive disorder feels like from the inside:
Imagine that your mind got stuck on a certain thought or image …
Then this thought or image got replayed in your mind, over and over again, no matter what you did …
You don’t want these thoughts – it feels like an avalanche …
Along with the thoughts come intense feelings of anxiety …
Anxiety is your brain’s warning system. When you feel anxious, it feels like you are in danger. Anxiety is an emotion that tells you to respond, react, protect yourself, DO SOMETHING!
On the one hand, you might recognize that the fear doesn’t make sense, doesn’t seem reasonable, yet it still feels very real, intense, and true …
Why would your brain lie?
Why would you have these feelings if they weren’t true? Feelings don’t lie … Do they?
Unfortunately, if you have OCD, they do lie. …
How many Americans have problems like these, where their thinking and feeling (or whatever lurks behind their thinking and feeling) profoundly deceives them? Fasten your seat belt, because in addition to the 2-3 million with OCD, the National Institute of Mental Health reports that almost 14.8 million American adults have a major depressive disorder, 21 million have a mood disorder, 5.7 million suffer from bipolar disorder, 2.4 million have schizophrenia, 40 million have an anxiety disorder, 6 million have a panic disorder, 7.7 million are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, 6.8 million have generalized anxiety disorder, 15 million have a social phobia (fear of any situation where escape may be difficult, like traveling in a car, bus or airplane) and another 19 million have some type of specific phobia (marked, persistent fear and avoidance of a specific object or situation).
There are multitudes of phobias, from ablutophobia (fear of washing or bathing), to acarophobia (fear of itching or of the insects that cause itching), achluophobia (fear of darkness), acrophobia (fear of heights), aerophobia (fear of flying), aeronausiphobia (fear of vomiting secondary to airsickness), agateophobia (fear of insanity), agraphobia (fear of sexual abuse), agrizoophobia (fear of wild animals), algophobia (fear of pain), agoraphobia (fear of open spaces or crowds), agyrophobia (fear of streets or crossing the street), aichmophobia (fear of needles or pointed objects), amathophobia (fear of dust), amaxophobia (fear of riding in a car), androphobia (fear of men), anginophobia (fear of angina or choking), anthrophobia (fear of flowers), anthropophobia (fear of people or society), aphenphosmphobia (fear of being touched), apiphobia (fear of bees), apotemnophobia (fear of persons with amputations), arachnophobia (fear of spiders), arithmophobia (fear of numbers), arsonphobia (fear of fire), asthenophobia (fear of fainting or weakness), astraphobia (fear of thunder and lightning), ataxophobia (fear of disorder or untidiness), atelophobia (fear of imperfection), atychiphobia (fear of failure), automysophobia (fear of being dirty) and autophobia (fear of being alone or of oneself).
And those are just the A’s; B through Z spell out hundreds more! But what most if not all phobias have in common is a root in some traumatic experience that has generated a syndrome of unwanted, irrationally fearful thoughts and feelings.
By the way, the mental health statistics cited above, which appear to account for around half of Americans, don’t even include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, one of the most common diagnoses in children and adolescents, or autism spectrum disorder, which now afflicts as many as one in 50 American kids, according to the CDC.
Makes you wonder: Is there anybody left who is not afflicted?
Amputation of healthy organs ‘the new normal’
Having made this quick survey, something very strange now comes into view.
All of these conditions, whatever their symptoms or level of severity, are named and described in the psychiatrists’ bible – the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the most recent being the fifth edition (so-called “DSM-5”) – and all are considered “pathological” (that is, “relating to, or caused by, disease”) and classified as “disorders.”
Well, all except one.
Ironically, one the most extreme of all of these conditions – at least in terms of its preferred treatment, which often involves the amputation of healthy body parts, and whose sufferers have one of the highest suicide-attempt rates of any population on earth – is for some reason in the process of being de-pathologized, that is, reclassified as normal.
Indeed, the recent renaming of gender identity disorder as gender dysphoria, thanks to pressure from the powerful LGBT lobby, means the condition itself is no longer considered abnormal or “disordered” at all, but only the anxiety one may feel over it – anxiety LGBT apologists blame largely on public ignorance and intolerance.
Actually, this “dysphoria” business is a strategic half-measure; the unabashed, publicly stated goal of the LGBT world is to get gender identity disorder completely de-pathologized so it is officially and legally declared to be an absolutely normal variant of human sexuality. It is, after all, the “T” in the LGBT coalition, which represents itself as a minority community exactly like Blacks and Jews – so, no room for mental illness in the mix.
Ironically, there is some criticism toward the latest edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” among mental health professionals, who claim the manual makes it too easy to diagnose people as “disordered.” For example, as one clinical psychologist wrote in Slate:
DSM-5 will change … the criteria for “generalized anxiety disorder,” a disorder that involves excessive and persistent worrying. Whereas the criteria in DSM-4 required three out of six symptoms of worrying, only one symptom is needed in DSM-5.
How, then, when today’s mental-health trend is to categorize more and more marginally problematic human behaviors as diagnosable “disorders,” does the mental/emotional state that craves having healthy body parts amputated in a pathetic and utterly impossible quest to change genders become magically transformed into something “normal”?
NBC News, like many in the big media, trumpeted the good news in this headline: “Being transgender no longer a ‘mental disorder’: APA.” As the network reported:
The American Psychiatric Association has revised its “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” and it no longer lists being transgender as a mental disorder, among other changes announced this past weekend.
Transgender people will now be diagnosed with “gender dysphoria,” which means emotional stress related to gender identity. “Gender identity disorder” had been listed as a mental disorder since the third edition of the “DSM” more than 20 years ago.
In an interview with “The Advocate,” APA member Jack Drescher explained the new revision, saying, “All psychiatric diagnoses occur within a cultural context. We know there is a whole community of people out there who are not seeking medical attention and live between the two binary categories. We wanted to send the message that the therapist’s job isn’t to pathologize.”
Drescher’s comment that “all psychiatric diagnoses occur within a cultural context” is just code, of course, for admitting that the American Psychiatric Association cravenly caved in to LGBT demands to remove the “disorder” label.
One organization that successfully lobbied for the change, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, confirms that it …
conducted a consensus process in order to make recommendations for revision of the DSM diagnoses of Gender Identity Disorders. … The [work group] recommended changing the diagnosis to one based on distress rather than on identity, on which the current diagnosis is based.
“There was consensus,” the group reported, “that a transgender identity is not pathology. Gender variant individuals are not inherently disordered; rather, the distress of gender dysphoria is the psychological problem.”
If that line of thinking seems confusing, just wait: A report in the peer-reviewed journal “Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry” uses opaque academic lingo and tortured multicultural logic to rationalize why there’s nothing at all wrong with people who want to cut off healthy breasts or genitalia in pursuit of “gender transition”:
As a diagnostic category, gender identity disorder remains problematic with ongoing debates concerning etiology, definition and ethics of treatment. Inherent in the current DSM definition is a Western model of the relationship between sex and gender which epitomizes the tension existing between essentialist and constructivist accounts of gender development. This model determines that gender-aberrant behavior and gender variation are, by definition, pathological, and reinforces a binary gender model. Studies of non-Western cultures reveal variations in models of gender and in the understanding of gender deviance. Cultures vary in their definition of gender roles and show varying degrees of tolerance for atypical gender behaviors and gender change. An understanding of cultural context is important in the clinical assessment of atypical gender development and challenges current models of sex and gender.
Translation: If you think there’s something wrong with people who want to amputate parts of their body, you’re an ignorant xenophobe, biased in favor of oppressive Western culture and hung up on the outdated notion that there are just two genders. If you were more multiculturally enlightened, you would realize it is just your own prejudice and narrow frame of reference that is the real problem here.
But back in the world of reality, transgenderism (or transsexualism) is not normal. In fact, it’s so abnormal and unnatural that a staggeringly tragic 41 percent of all transgender individuals living in the United States have attempted to commit suicide, according to a 2010 study.
Sign the petition demanding an end to the madness! No men in girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms or showers! Just say no!
And more recently, “sex change regret” is emerging as a huge reality, as The Federalist documented in its “Trouble in Transtopia” report, concluding: “Biological truth has a way of outing itself. The hard reality of it is written right into our DNA as ‘male’ or ‘female.’ In the end, transgender activists and their media enablers won’t be able to drown that massive iceberg.”
In fact, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Paul R. McHugh, M.D., confirms that transgenderism is indeed a “mental disorder.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, McHugh, who is currently Hopkins’ Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, cites a long-term Swedish study that followed transgendered persons for up to 30 years, revealing that “beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable non-transgender population.”
What about those special transgender camps now springing up in the U.S., where parents of young children who like to play or dress as the opposite sex take their kids, presumably to affirm and celebrate these poor children’s supposed “transgender identity”? McHugh reveals: “When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70 to 80 percent of them spontaneously lost those feelings.”
Meanwhile, the same politically influenced psychiatric elite that see fit to diagnose millions of fidgety schoolboys with the “mental disorder” of ADHD (and then “treat” them with powerful and poorly understood drugs), are re-categorizing the undeniably extreme transgender disorder as normal.
Why has the American Psychiatric Association given in to activist pressure with regard to transsexuals?
For the same reason the same psychiatrist organization, coming under the same pressure, declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, while its sister organization, the American Psychological Association, followed suit two years later.
Stunningly, the former president of the American Psychological Association – indeed, the man who actually introduced the motion to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness in 1975 – is now sounding the alarm. Dr. Nicholas Cummings says the psychologists’ organization has become dominated by “ultraliberals” under the thumb of the “gay rights movement.” Since the mid-1990s, warns Cummings, the group’s positions have become based on “political stances” that “seemed to override any scientific results,” adding, “Cherry-picking results became the mode. The gay rights movement sort of captured the APA.”
Watch interview with Dr. Nicholas Cummings, the pro-gay rights former president of the American Psychological Association, who admits that no genuine, scientific, unbiased is ever done on homosexuality and that the psychologists’ group has been taken over by the gay rights movement:
How far will the official normalization of pathological sexuality go? So-called Genetic Sexual Attraction (adult incest) is intruding into the mainstream with ever greater frequency, with news stories of fathers marrying their daughters and having children together. No word as to whether the American Psychiatric Association’s stance on incest is “evolving.” However, believe it or not, the APA actually altered the classification of pedophilia in the latest edition of its “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” from a “disorder” to a “sexual orientation.”
But wait! “Sexual orientations” are protected classes of Americans according to the current generation of “anti-discrimination” laws. That would make pedophiles a protected class!
After a deafening public outcry, the APA released a press statement claiming it was all just a big mistake: “‘Sexual orientation’ is not a term used in the diagnostic criteria for pedophilic disorder,” the psychiatrists’ group clarified, “and its use in the DSM-5 text discussion is an error and should read ‘sexual interest.’” The group promised to correct the error in its manual’s next edition.
Reclaiming reality and sanity
Part and parcel of the decision to reclassify conditions once considered mental illnesses – like homosexuality and transsexuality – as normal, benign, healthy sexual or gender “orientations,” is a determination that these proclivities are largely determined by genetics.
But a generation ago, before the search for the elusive and hypothetical “gay gene” ever began, psychologists and psychiatrists believed aberrant sexual attractions and obsessions often were rooted in childhood trauma.
Is it true? Certainly it’s undeniable that little children, being so exquisitely impressionable, are powerfully shaped by the environment in which they grow up. Early sexual abuse, for example, can be devastating, and it’s a sad fact that our prisons house many child molesters who were themselves molested as children.
Objective consideration of true causes is also complicated by the fact that today’s psychiatric priesthood just doesn’t seem that interested. Ever-increasing weight is instead placed on biological factors like genetics, infections, brain defects or injury, prenatal damage, substance abuse and poor nutrition. Moreover, even when factors like childhood abuse (physical, emotional or sexual), divorce, death in the family, etc., are considered, the “therapy” – almost always, drugs – doesn’t deal with the trauma. How, for example, can psychiatric drugs undo a young woman’s hatred and feelings of betrayal toward her father for having abused and/or abandoned her when she was a little girl?
The evolving medical philosophy that says our mental health problems are determined largely by genetics and other mysterious biological factors is increasingly at war with reality.
To dramatize the problem, let’s engage in a sort of thought experiment: Consider how some unfortunate children in the Arab-Muslim Middle East develop a bad case of (let’s give it a clinical name) “jihad martyrdom syndrome.” I think it’s fair to say that the compulsion to kill dozens of innocent people and yourself, while simultaneously believing the creator of the universe will reward you for mass murder with endless sex with six dozen beautiful women in the afterlife, is at least as serious a disorder as some of the newly minted “mental illnesses” in the latest “DSM,” like “mild cognitive impairment” and “binge eating disorder.”
So, how exactly do innocent little kids come to be possessed by such all-consuming emotions and delusional beliefs that lead them to blow themselves up while slaughtering innocent strangers?
If one suggested genetics, biochemical imbalances or environmental toxins were responsible, everyone would laugh. Little jihadists are created when, from an early age, they are continually traumatized – indoctrinated daily to hate infidels and see them as less than human – intimidated, degraded, frightened, rewarded, tempted, brutalized, brainwashed, lied to, punished, threatened, and praised (for reinforcement) – until their little developing minds and emotions no longer belong to them. They internalize and act out a completely new implanted identity, utterly foreign to the one with which they were born.
If the forces in one child’s life can thus transform him so totally that, when he looks in a mirror, he sees someone with an overwhelming desire to kill “infidels” in a glorious “martyrdom operation,” couldn’t the forces in another child’s life (perhaps far more subtle, but nevertheless powerful) transform him or her into a person with feelings, thoughts, and desires he likewise was not born with – including homosexual or transgender feelings? Many lesbians have confessed that their hatred for their cruel, abusive fathers blocked them from bonding to men later in life. Why is this so hard to understand?
At the extreme, consider the sad story of “female-to-male” transsexual Nancy Verhelst of Belgium, who was legally euthanized by lethal injection after a botched sex-change operation. The back story? Her parents hated and rejected her because she was a girl and they wanted another boy. So this poor girl tried to become a boy, and when it didn’t work, she took her life.
Many other types of unseen (from the outside) but devastating family dysfunction, along with various forms of child abuse and sexual molestation, are indisputably powerful factors in causing sexual deviance later in life. In particular, it’s scandalous that childhood sexual abuse as a well-known pathway into homosexuality is virtually ignored in our culture’s rush to glorify aberrant sexual practices.
A multitude of peer-reviewed studies corroborate the fundamental truth that childhood trauma plays a huge role in later homosexuality:
A study by scientists at Brown University reveals that “research has indicated a high prevalence of childhood sexual abuse among men who have sex with men in the United States.”
University of Pittsburgh researchers in a 2011 meta-analysis likewise conclude, “The higher rates of abuse experienced by sexual minority youths may be one of the driving mechanisms underlying higher rates of mental health problems, substance use, risky sexual behavior, and HIV reported by sexual minority adults.”
Then there’s the 2012 study out of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital which documented that “Gay/lesbian respondents had higher odds of exposure to child abuse” than heterosexuals, and “bisexual respondents had higher odds of exposure to child abuse … and intimate partner violence” than heterosexuals.
These studies and others corroborate earlier research, like the 2007 study by Boston College researchers, which found that “childhood sexual abuse was associated with alarmingly high rates of men who were HIV infected and antecedent risk behaviors.”
Another study, in 2008, from Boston Children’s Hospital whose researchers concluded: “This study documents prevalent and persistent abuse disproportionately experienced by lesbian and bisexual women.”
And in a comprehensive 2013 study, titled “Does Maltreatment in Childhood Affect Sexual Orientation in Adulthood?” and published by the National Institutes of Health, researchers at Harvard and Columbia documented definitively: “Epidemiological studies find a positive association between childhood maltreatment and same-sex sexuality in adulthood, with lesbians and gay men reporting 1.6 to 4 times greater prevalence of sexual and physical abuse than heterosexuals …”
Confirming that “numerous studies document an association between childhood physical and sexual abuse, neglect, and witnessing violence in childhood and same-sex sexuality,” this highly revealing study identifies several “pathways” for such early-childhood engendering of same-sex feelings:
“(1) abuse of boys perpetrated by men causes boys to believe they are gay;
“(2) abuse of girls by men leads them to be averse to sexual relationships with men;
“(3) abuse survivors may feel stigmatized and different from others and may, therefore, be more willing to behave in ways that are socially stigmatized, including acknowledging same-sex attraction or having same-sex partners.”
Yet, however clear, compelling, and heartbreaking the evidence, none of this seems to matter. Fewer and fewer people seem to care any more about actual causes and effects, about the true nature of things. Instead, too many of us care only about what we want to believe, what we wish to be true. We want homosexuality to be a healthy lifestyle, even though, as the Wall Street Journal has documented, “Projections have shown that if current trends continue, half of all gay and bisexual men will be HIV-positive by age 50.” We want transgenderism to be normal, even though common sense and a mountain of evidence – not to mention basic biology – shout otherwise.
As always, there is a very big price to pay for willfully denying reality. The LGBT movement has not only succeeded in mainstreaming behaviors all previous generations considered pathological and immoral; it also insists that the rest of society not only accept these behaviors, but affirm and celebrate them – or be punished.
Burgeoning totalitarianism
Today, what started in the ’60s as “gay liberation,” later called “gay rights,” then “LGBT” (and more recently “LGBTQIA,” for lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-questioning-intersex-asexual), has metastasized into an ever-expanding form of totalitarianism and persecution of religious conscientious objectors.
Legislation is sweeping the country, outlawing counseling help for minors who want to overcome unwanted same-sex attractions; decreeing that boys and young men must be allowed to use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms if they claim to identify with the opposite sex (and vice versa); mandating pro-homosexual/pro-transgender indoctrination of children at kindergarten and even preschool age; requiring the integration of open homosexuals into the military; forcing same-sex marriage on the nation; and, perhaps most shockingly, persecuting individuals and businesses that simply oppose the LGBT agenda on moral and religious grounds:
Some of the cases are high profile, like that of Brendan Eich, the tech prodigy who created JavaScript and co-founded Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox browser, who committed the unpardonable sin of donating $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8 upholding traditional marriage. For that he was forced out as CEO of his company.
HGTV pulled the plug on its highly anticipated reality show, “Flip it Forward,” starring David and Jason Benham. The problem? The Benham twins are Christians with mainstream, traditional beliefs, including a belief that homosexuality and same-sex marriage are neither moral nor biblical. Their show was killed in the cradle.
“Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson, an evangelical Christian, started a firestorm of protest after he told GQ magazine he believed homosexuality is a sin. The show’s creator, A&E, announced it was indefinitely suspending Robertson from its most lucrative show, until a massive public backlash caused the network to realize its colossal stupidity and it reinstated Robertson.
Media reports that Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy opposed same-sex marriage and donated to traditional-values groups prompted “gay” activists to call for protests and a national boycott, with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel banning Chick-fil-A from the city and several universities barring Chick-fil-A from their campuses. Although the boycott effort backfired in the short term – when “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” and grassroots goodwill resulted in a dramatic increase in the chain’s income – in the longer run, the intimidation had its desired effect: Dan Cathy later said he made a “mistake” and had become “wiser.” Perhaps part of what weakened his prior resolve was the August 2012 attempted mass-murder attack on the Family Research Council, when an angry homosexual activist named Floyd Lee Corkins entered FRC’s Washington, D.C., headquarters carrying 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches and a 9-mm handgun, shooting a security guard before being overcome by the courageous staffer. After his arrest, Corkins – who told FBI agents he was inspired to commit the terror attack on the Christian organization by the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” – confessed he had planned to “kill as many people as I could … then smear a Chicken-fil-A sandwich on their face.”
Now that’s tolerance for you.
A major win for homosexual activists was the Boy Scouts of America, which they relentlessly pressured year after year, putting enormous financial, legal, boycott, and media pressure on the private group until enough members of its governing body finally weakened – and then broke – admitting open homosexuals, in the process severely wounding the century-old “morally straight,” Christian-inspired organization for boys.
Remember Carrie Prejean, Miss California USA, who during finals of the Miss USA Pageant was ambushed by homosexual pageant judge Perez Hilton who asked for Prejean’s opinion of same-sex marriage? Her kind, respectful and utterly normal response – “I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman” – was considered so outrageous that the evangelical Christian contestant was widely mocked and ridiculed.
More recently was the firestorm surrounding the family-owned Indiana restaurant, Memories Pizza. The owner’s 21-year-old daughter, replying to a hypothetical question posed by a local TV news reporter, said her family was devoutly Christian and wouldn’t in good conscience be able to cater a homosexual wedding. This resulted in a mountain of obscene abuse and death threats, including threats and incitement to burn down the family’s business, which was forced temporarily to close.
‘Cease and desist’ being a Christian
But these high-profile news events don’t even begin to paint the true picture. The exact same sorts of totalitarian “you-aren’t-allowed-to-even-think-that way” assaults are occurring all the time, throughout America. Here (courtesy of Americans for Truth) are just a few more everyday examples:
Did you heard about New Mexico Christian photographers Jon and Elaine Huguenin, who were sued by two lesbians under the state’s “sexual orientation” law after declining to photograph the lesbians’ “commitment ceremony”?
Or the New Jersey case of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, convicted of “discrimination” after two lesbians, Harriet Bernstein and Luisa Paster, decided to hold their “commitment ceremony” on the Methodist-run association’s popular family-friendly boardwalk? After that, Ocean Grove quit the wedding-hosting business.
Or what about the Aloha Bed & Breakfast in Hawaii, a Christian business forced to “accommodate” two Southern California lesbians after a judge ruled the B&B violated state law when the owner told Taeko Bufford and Diane Cervelli she wasn’t comfortable having them stay together in her home, due to her religious beliefs? Aloha has since been ordered by the state “to provide a room to any same-sex couple that wishes to stay there.”
Or Illinois Christian bed & breakfast owners Jim and Beth Walder who, for expressing their religious convictions regarding homosexuality, have been sued by LGBT activist Todd Wathen, who demanded monetary damages, attorneys’ fees and “an order directing [the Walders] to cease and desist from any violation” of the state’s Human Rights Act.
Or Vermont’s Wildflower Inn, which paid a settlement to lesbians and shut down its wedding reception business after the ACLU won a $10,000 civil penalty for two lesbians. The settlement also requires the inn’s owners to place $20,000 in a charitable trust for the lesbians.
What about Oregon’s “Sweet Cakes by Melissa” bakery, which shut down after declining to bake for a “gay wedding”? Or owners of Indiana’s “Just Cookies,” who, for refusing to fill a special order for “rainbow cookies” for an LGBT group, were charged with “discrimination” under the city’s “sexual orientation” law. Or Colorado’s “Masterpiece Cakes,” target of a formal complaint by the state’s attorney general for refusing, on religious grounds, to make a “gay” wedding cake. Or Iowa’s “Victoria’s Cake Cottage,” whose owner Victoria Childress refused to provide a wedding cake for a homosexual couple out of “convictions for their lifestyle.” Or Oregon’s “Fleur Cakes,” which joined “Sweet Cakes” in refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
And what about Washington state’s “Arlene’s Flowers,” whose owner Barronelle Stutzman declined to provide flowers for the wedding of a same-sex couple who had long frequented her shop, because of her “relationship with Jesus Christ”? She later faced two lawsuits. Or New York’s “Liberty Ridge Farm,” which refused to allow its property to be rented out for a lesbian “wedding.” Or Texas’ “All Occasion Party Place,” a Fort Worth venue that refused, on religious grounds, to rent out a banquet hall for homosexual “wedding” receptions.
Do I need to keep going?
What about Craig James, fired by Fox Sports Southwest after a GOP debate tape showed him expressing Christian beliefs in opposition to “homosexual marriage”? Or the Christian T-shirt maker in Kentucky being targeted by the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission for refusing to print “gay pride” designs for a local homosexual group?
What about Chris Penner, owner of the Twilight Room Annex bar in Portland, who was fined $400,000 under the Oregon Equality Act for excluding transgender men who, dressed as women, had been alienating other customers by using the women’s restroom. According to the Seattle Times, 11 people – calling themselves the “T-girls” – “will get the money, with awards ranging from $20,000 to 50,000.”
There are mountains of other examples – the Catholic Church being forced to shut down successful adoption agencies in several states because it opposes adoption by homosexual couples; Christians kicked out of college counseling programs because they oppose homosexuality; therapists prohibited by law from helping young people overcome unwanted same-sex attractions; “ex-gay” and pro-change therapists forced out of business by lawsuits; people fired from their jobs solely because they oppose same-sex marriage; school districts forced to positively affirm homosexuality; “anti-gay” 501(c)(3) organizations having their nonprofit status challenged; even a proposal to ban Christians from serving in government if they had ever demonstrated “bias” against homosexuals.
On and on it goes, increasing, not diminishing, with each passing year.
Many thought same-sex marriage would be the crowning achievement of the LGBT movement and that the juggernaut would finally wind down. But then, suddenly the focus shifted to “transgender rights,” with Time magazine’s “The Transgender Tipping Point” issue trumpeting the headline, “America’s next civil rights frontier,” and Vice President Joe Biden likewise proclaiming transgender discrimination “the civil rights issue of our time.” And then – brace yourself – there were reports of three-year-old children being required to sign a contract promising they will not use “transphobic language” in nursery school!
The secret of this never-ending, always-expanding revolutionary movement, in case you haven’t realized, is that it has the full support of the far left. Not because the left loves homosexuals, bisexuals and transsexuals for themselves, but because finally the left has found its spear-tip, with which – as it has dreamed of doing for decades – it can effectively attack, wound, marginalize, demonize and criminalize its greatest enemy: religion.
Indeed, the LGBT sexual anarchy movement has the unique potential to permanently corrupt our civilization’s core institution, marriage and family, as well as our core “operating system,” Judeo-Christian values.
Yet ironically, it is the one issue almost everybody is afraid to confront.
Like Voldemort, the arch-villain so feared by everyone in the Harry Potter stories that they “do not speak his name,” almost no one – not Democrats, not Republicans, not Libertarians, not the news media, not even most churches – dares speak openly about it. Indeed, many have succumbed and joined forces with it.
However, when considering the increasing assault on the American mindscape we’ve explored in this book, ask yourself this: How can the simultaneous glorification of sexual perversion, the revolutionary re-definition of “marriage” and “family,” and the criminalization of the religion that for centuries has served as America’s moral foundation, not compound the epidemic of stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, and suicide today plaguing our nation?
Is it not time for us to face reality and give up the illusions now tearing our nation apart? Can’t we understand why, after thousands of years of human history, letting a few judges in black robes suddenly and radically redefine the most foundational institution of the human race – marriage – is a bad idea? And is it not madness to think we can transform a man into a woman by surgically fiddling with his plumbing and feeding him hormones – when every single one of his body’s 37.2 trillion cells is permanently coded “male” with Y chromosomes? Paul R. McHugh, Johns Hopkins Hospital’s former top psychiatrist, affirms it simply is “biologically impossible” to change the sex you were born with, and that those who advocate “sexual reassignment surgery” are thus promoting mental illness.
Sign the petition demanding an end to the madness! No men in girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms or showers! Just say no!
We Americans are in desperate need of serious self-reflection, of awakening, and a radical course correction. Perhaps more than ever, we need to take a good, long, hard, uncompromisingly honest look at ourselves in the mirror.
But what will we see staring back at us?
Will we – like the starving anorexic girl who saw in the mirror only “disgusting fat,” or the man with transgender feelings who saw the reflection of a woman beckoning – continue to be drawn into a deceptive fantasy world, one where intense emotions of unclear origin drown out reality? Will we continue to embrace a brave new world of constantly mutating sexual anarchy, one so disconnected from science, faith, reason, and the lessons of history that it can lead us only into societal chaos?
Or, will we finally be able to see past the illusions generated by ceaseless propaganda and pressure? Will we be able to break free and catch a glimpse of our true self once again – a people uniquely blessed by God, and who in previous generations, despite whatever challenges and hardships we faced, were safely grounded (as George Washington admonished) in the twin virtues of “religion and morality”? For our children’s sake, let us fervently hope our nation can once again reclaim this great blessing.
In the next chapter we will focus on the growing war for the American mind, and will survey the extraordinary battlefields now shaping up between the forces of sanity and madness, the outcome of which will determine who ultimately runs the American asylum – the sane people, or the lunatics.
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