The Marxist Roots of
"Gay Liberation"

By Robert Knight

Biography

Robert Knight is a longtime conservative journalist, former news editor at the Los Angeles Times, former Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and has launched cultural studies programs at the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and the Media Research Center. He is the author of Radical Rulers: The White House Elites Who Are Pushing America Toward Socialism (Coral Ridge Ministries, 2010) and several other books.

The Marxist Roots of
"Gay Liberation"

A lot of people today, including many conservatives, say that in a time of economic crisis, the social issues aren’t important.

They’re dead wrong. And the best evidence is the Left’s continued and aggressive pursuit of a radical sexual agenda. They have long campaigned for unlimited abortion, even for minors without parental knowledge, and recognition and promotion of all forms of sexuality, including homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, polyamory, polygamy and even pederasty and child sex. Plus, unrestricted obscenity.

C.S. Lewis once said that the agenda of the Left is to make pornography public and religion private, which pretty much sums up the ACLU’s activities over the years since it was founded in 1920 by onetime Communist Party member Roger Baldwin.

There’s a reason for all this, and it goes back to the birth of the Left in the 18th Century.

Families and the moral order stand firmly in the way of any socialist revolution. Families and religion inculcate independence and a strong set of values and personal responsibility.

People conditioned to think as short-term opportunists instead of as members of the family tree with long-term moral obligations are easier to manipulate. Given the false promise of a painless future free from individual responsibility, they are less likely to recognize, much less oppose, further trespasses on their liberty. Which is why the leftists now running Congress and the White House are trying to amass as much power in government as possible and away from individuals, families and the free market.

Socialism begins with a profound, fatal error: the misreading of human nature. The Judeo-Christian worldview acknowledges two key truths: We are created in the image of God, by God, and therefore have a right to life. And yet we are flawed; we’re all sinners. Informed by this, America’s founders created a government that protects life and limits the power that any man or group of men can hold over others.

Socialists, on the other hand, believe that man is good and that man can be perfected through a utopian system into being essentially perfect, sharing all things and exhibiting all virtues. Since this is so wrong and against human nature itself, it results in the use of force and tyranny, beginning with an assault on morality itself.

The marriage-based moral order has been in the bull’s-eye of socialist activists since the French Revolution, as chronicled by historian James Billington, who became Librarian of Congress, in his master work, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. Billington wrote that in the Parisian cafes where the French Revolution was spawned, sexual libertinism reigned. The ensuing chaos after the royalty were overthrown led to guillotines in the public square and blasphemous nature worship in Notre Dame Cathedral.

Later, Frederich Engels, Karl Marx’s co-author, in his 1884 opus, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, provided a dark view of marriage and bourgeois morality:

[W]hen monogamous marriage first makes its appearance in history, it is not as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such a reconciliation. Quite the contrary. Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period.

Engels argued basically for "free love" as a byproduct of the advance of communism, writing that:

"With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society."

Freed from any economic implications, Engels argued, women and men will make up their own rules and be liberated at last:

"[T]hey will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individualand that will be the end of it."

Dr. Allan Carlson of the Howard Center notes that the Soviet Union took Engels’ advice very seriously:

"Back in 1926, the new Communist rulers of Soviet Russia shocked the world with a plan to abolish the legal registration of marriage."

The plan failed as the birth rate plummeted and the government resumed incentives instead of disincentives for marriage.

But the Left’s war on morality and capitalism, with its chosen instrument, the sexual revolution, persisted. It took off in America in the 1950s and 1960s after Alfred C. Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. These books, which appear to be scientific, and packed with statistics and graphs, gave a deliberately false view of Americans’ sex lives. The Kinsey books, as exposed by Dr. Judith Reisman and Edward Eichel in Kinsey, Sex and Fraud in 1990, provided the scientific cover for attacking the moral order and launching "comprehensive sex education," which is really about corrupting kids at earlier and earlier ages.

Hugh Hefner cited Kinsey as his mentor, and began the pornography revolution with his founding of Playboy magazine in 1953, which helped weaken America’s family-based society, and paved the way for the feminist and homosexual movements, which are key components of the political Left. Hefner funded many leftist causes, including the court cases that led to Roe v. Wade (1973) and the legalization of abortion. Cliff Kincaid has done remarkable work over the years in exposing the Playboy connection to the political and cultural Left.

Now, let’s ratchet up to the current day, and see just how far this corruption has spread. It’s not only everywhere in the culture, but in the highest levels of government.

On May 19, 2009, Barack Obama appointed Kevin Jennings as Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools. As the "safe schools czar," Mr. Jennings oversees a $100 million budget and dispenses grants that induce schools to adopt federally approved programs, particularly those billed as "anti-bullying."

On October 5, the U.S. Department of Education announced $38.8 million in grants to 11 states from a new Safe and Supportive School program out of Jennings’ office. The eleven are: Arizona, California, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The grants require in-depth surveys of students, family, and staff about school safety issues and "direct grant monies to the schools that the students say have the biggest problems," according to a release. In practice, that probably means that the schools that have the most active and vocal gay/straight alliance groups will be the ones getting the money. By the way, for fiscal year 2011, Jennings has asked for $165 million to expand the program to additional states.

The grants come in the wake of a series of suicides of homosexual or homosexual-perceived teens that has reached almost the level of media coverage that Matthew Shepard got after his 1998 murder in Wyoming. As with Matthew, the coverage makes homosexuality the only issue in these tragic incidents, and ignores what might be complicating factors. The Left is using these tragedies as a way to foster support for anti-bullying programs that actually promote homosexuality to kids.

Kevin Jennings is a former Massachusetts teacher who founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network or GLSEN in 1990. GLSEN has grown immensely since then, with an annual budget exceeding $3.5 million. GLSEN sponsors Gay/Straight Alliance clubs in hundreds of public and even private schools, and initiated the Day of Silence, Allies Day and Anti Bullying Day, all of which are billed as spreading tolerance but are really about promoting homosexuality.

As Family Research Council Senior Fellow Peter Sprigg wrote recently:

"In a 1995 speech, Jennings admitted that his rhetoric about "safety" was a political device:

‘We immediately seized upon the opponent's calling cardsafety . . . . [W]e automatically threw our opponents onto the defensive and stole their best line of attack. This framing short-circuited their arguments and left them back-pedaling from day one.’

In a 1997 speech, Jennings spoke openly about the desirability of actively "promoting" homosexuality:

"We were busy putting out press releases, and saying, "We’re not promoting homosexuality, that’s not what our program’s about. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." [But] being finished might some day mean that most straight people, when they would hear that someone was promoting homosexuality, would say "Yeah, who cares?" . . . That is our mission from this day forward."

Indeed. And they have pursued it aggressively.

GLSEN has a reading list for kindergarten up through high school. The GLSEN book list includes Rainbow Boys, recommended for grades 7th and up, in which a teen boy has a graphic sexual encounter with an older man.

Other titles include Passages of Pride, Queer 13, Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth, Revolutionary Voices, Reflections of a Rock Lobster and Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian.

A random analysis of the books at Gateway Pundit blog says, "Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren't merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between preschoolers ...."

As The Washington Times reports, "Eleven of the recommended books were examined by Scott Baker from Breitbart.tv Numerous passages discuss kids having sex with adults. Many are too explicit for us to publish."

In his 1996 autobiography Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son, Jennings describes his marijuana use in high school in Hawaii and says, "I got stoned spending hours watching planes take off and land at the airport, which is actually quite fascinating when you are drunk and stoned." Recalling youthful indiscretion isn’t wrong, unless you don’t issue any regrets about it, and especially if you are tapped as the guy to keep schools "drug free."

Jennings also admitted counseling a 15 or 16 year old boy, "Brewster," who had sex with a man at a bus station. Rather than dissuade him from such encounters, Jennings merely advised him, "I hope you used a condom."

What else was Jennings up to?

On March 25, 2000, GLSEN co-sponsored a seminar at Tufts University in Massachusetts in which teens as young as 12 were taught specific homosexual sex acts, some of which are patently dangerous. When a parent, Scott Whiteman, revealed audio tapes of the seminar, Jennings’ lawyers tried to get a court to ban distribution of the tape and then sued Whiteman and Brian Camenker, director of the Parents Rights Coalition, which had distributed the tape. Jennings, who was the keynote speaker at what Massachusetts News publisher Ed Pawlick later dubbed "Fistgate," was totally unrepentant about kids being exposed to the graphic information and later defended the event.

In 2005, GLSEN distributed a "safe sex" guide to Massachusetts high schoolers that included the addresses and phone numbers of homosexual bars. As The Washington Times notes in an editorial:

"The guide’s descriptions of what goes on in these bars is explicit. Over here, there’s ‘dancing, young guys and those who like young guys.’ Over there, the ambience is ‘old school, cruisy, sex-charged late at night.’ At another hot spot, there’s ‘porn on the television, the old, the young. Something for everyone.’"

"Jennings defenders accuse anyone who dares question this senior presidential appointee with hate and homophobia. That’s a twisted moral universe where protecting homosexual minors from predators is ‘hate’ while helping teens become conveniently alcohol-addled prey is, what love?"

The Times is actually being cautious. The booklet in question has a lot more than gay bars in it. And the item on the bar with "porn on the television" is for the club Paradise, and begins: "Strippers dancing on the pool tables and bonking their heads on the overhead lights."

Jennings was also a member of the radical homosexual group Act-Up, which invaded St. Patrick’s Cathedral and used terror tactics against policy makers and pharmaceutical companies. Jennings is listed as a sponsor of a 2009 art exhibit at Harvard University entitled "ACT-UP New York: Activism, Art and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993. The exhibit includes a photo of Catholic Cardinal John O’Connor of New York with large block letters proclaiming "KNOW YOUR SCUMBAGS."

O’Connor, who Act-Up activists spit upon during a parade and denounced as a "hater," had quietly opened the city’s largest number of AIDS clinics and hospices and made many personal visits to the dying.

Jennings wrote the foreword to the book Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue About Sexualities and Schooling, which includes an essay by a lesbian who taught her 7-year-old daughter to masturbate. She says that she and her daughter were both attracted to the same 12-year-old girl, and also says "queerly raised children are agents, using strategies of adaptation, negotiation, resistance and subversion."

On the back of this book is a blurb by none other than former Weather underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

As Linda Harvey writes in a WorldNetDaily article from Oct. 13, 2008:

"Ayers is not just a terrorist who attacked government buildings. He's an advocate of revolution in America by indoctrinating and sexually corrupting the next generation.

"Remember his comments about smashing monogamy? Remember his confession in the New York Times article on 9/11 about the Weathermen's sexual experimentation, including his own sex with his male best friend? Ayers is a recognized authority on ‘social justice’ education. It's time we uncovered what that really means."

Ayers' blurb is the first one listed on the back cover. It says:

"Queering Elementary Education is an important contribution to nourishing the ethical heart of teaching, reminding us how anemic and cold and partial our embrace of our students has too often been. For some readers this collection will be an affirmation, for others a surprise and challenge. But it is a book for all teachers and parents, indeed for anyone concerned with the healthy development of children and schools. And, yes, it has an agenda: it stands straight and strong for fairness, for respect, for humanity, for simple decency. "

Mrs. Harvey notes that "Obama was the first chairman of Ayers' Chicago Annenberg Challenge, so one can safely assume they share quite a few ideas about children and educating about ‘social justice.’"

She also notes that "in 2007, a group from the American Educational Research Association, or AERA, including Ayers, demanded major accrediting organization for schools, colleges, and departments of education include categories of "social justice, sexual orientation and gender identity" in its standards. Ayers and colleagues called their effort "Call to Action: A RED Campaign for Social Justice and Queer Lives." Ayers, formerly vice president for curriculum of the AERA, was the spokesman on behalf of the effort, calling on the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, or NCATE, to include these categories."

Back to Kevin Jennings. His official bio on the Department of Education website omits anything that might alert parents to his real agenda.

Here’s more of what the bio leaves out, courtesy of Peter LaBarbera’s Americans for Truth About Homosexuality Website at www.aftah.com:

Addressing a church audience on March 20, 2000 in New York City just days before "Fistgate" GLSEN Executive Director Kevin Jennings offered a stinging (and quite intolerant) assessment of how to deal with religious conservatives:

"Twenty percent of people are hard-core fair-minded [pro-homosexual] people. Twenty percent are hard-core [anti-homosexual] bigots. We need to ignore the hard-core bigots, get more of the hard-core fair-minded people to speak up, and we’ll pull that 60 percent [of people in the middle]   over to our side. That’s really what I think our strategy has to be. We have to quit being afraid of the religious right. We also have to quit I’m trying to find a way to say this. I’m trying not to say, ‘[F---] ‘em!’ which is what I want to say, because I don’t care what they think! [audience laughter] Drop dead!" Jennings speech to Marble Collegiate Church, March 20, 2000.

(It should be noted that GLSEN and Jennings make heavy use of the words "respect" and "tolerance" in their public rhetoric and in descriptions of their programs.)"

During remarks at GLSEN’s Mid-Atlantic conference, held October 25, 1997 at the Grace Church School in New York City, as recorded by Lambda Report, Jan.-Feb. 1998, Jennings said:.

" being finished might some day mean that most straight people, when they would hear that someone was promoting homosexuality, would say ‘Yeah, who cares?’ because they wouldn’t necessarily equate homosexuality with something bad that you would not want to promote"

"One of the people that’s always inspired me is Harry Hay, who started the first ongoing gay rights groups in America. In 1948, he tried to get people to join the Mattachine Society [the first American homosexual "rights" group]. It took him two years to find one other person who would join. Well, [in] 1993, Harry Hay marched with a million people in Washington, who thought he had a good idea 40 years before. [Note: the National Park Service estimated attendance at 300,000.]

"Everybody thought Harry Hay was crazy in 1948, and they knew something about him which he apparently did notthey were right, he was crazy. You are all crazy. We are all crazy. All of us who are thinking this way are crazy, because you know what? Sane people keep the world the same [sh*tty] old way it is now. It’s the people who think, ‘No, I can envision a day when straight people say, ‘So what if you’re promoting homosexuality?’ Or straight kids say, ‘Hey, why don’t you and your boyfriend come over before you go to the prom and try on your tuxes on at my house?’ That if we believe that can happen, we can make it happen. The only thing that will stop us is our lack of faith that we can make it happen. That is our mission from this day forward. To not lose our faith, to not lose our belief that the world can, indeed, be a different place. And think how much can change in one lifetime if in Harry Hay’s one very short life, he saw change from not even one person willing to join him to a million people willing to travel to Washington to join him. You can see the same change happen in your lifetime if you believe you can.’’

Who was Harry Hay?

According to his FBI file, which I read thanks to Cliff’s persistence with a Freedom of Information Act request, Hay and his wife Anita were members of the Communist Party in Los Angeles from the early ‘30s to 1948. He originally joined in 1934 under the name Karen Hunter, dropped out and rejoined in 1938 under another name when he was active in a writers group in Hollywood. Hay helped establish a Labor Front Theater, and was elected Branch Educational Director of the Joe Hill Branch of the Communist Party. The file notes that the release of the pro-Soviet wartime movie Mission to Moscow made the members "hysterical with joy."

In 1946, the file says, Hay attended an open meeting of the Communist Party at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles where "about 3,800 people were present."

In 1947, Hay instructed classes in Marxism, saying, according to the FBI informant, that the group’s aim was to "join unions and various other groups to instruct as to the successful overthrow of capitalism." At one meeting, Hay railed at General Electric and several other companies.

In 1950 Hay, who worked at various jobs, including as material planner for an aircraft company, screen writing and union organizing in Hollywood, founded the Mattachine Society, the first gay rights organization in America.

In 1951, Anita filed for divorce, which was made final in 1953. Although she claimed "mental cruelty," which was a common ground for divorce, the FBI report notes that Hay was being treated from 1948 to 1953 for syphilis.

From Wikipedia: "Following his ouster from Mattachine leadership in 1953, Hay largely withdrew from organized LGBT activism until the late 1970s, although he continued to participate in the movement informally and following the 1969 Stonewall riots, became involved in a local Gay Liberation Front chapter. In 1979, Hay and his longtime companion, inventor John Burnside, founded the Radical Faeries. There’s a picture of Hay in a skirt and pink sweater from a 1995 gathering.)

And who are the Radical Faeries? Well, try to imagine the nuttiest group of men, and you’d be hard pressed to make up anything more outlandish. They prance about in various stages of undress and women’s clothing and, according to Wikipedia, are dedicated to: "challenging commercialization and patriarchal aspects of modern LGBT life while celebrating pagan constructs and rituals."

In 2003, David Thorstad, a pedophile and a committed Leftist, wrote an essay entitled "Harry Hay on Man/Boy Love," for the NAMBLA Website:

"Harry, founder in 1950 of the first American gay group to survive, the Mattachine Society, cofounder of the Gay Liberation Front, Southern California chapter, in 1969, cofounder of the Radical Faeries in 1979, father of the U.S. gay movement, and grandfatherly icon of gay liberation, died on October 24, 2002, at the age of ninety.  Harry was a vocal and courageous supporter of NAMBLA and intergenerational sexual relationships.

"I first met Harry in early 1983, at the time of the first of these speeches.  I was introduced to him and his lovelyI almost said saintlycompanion, John Burnside, a lovable gay man if ever there was one, by lesbian activist, self-professed witch, and sometime weed partner Katherine Davenport, a mutual friend and journalist for the New York Native." 

He goes on to report that they marched in New York in 1994 with "the Spirit of Stonewall contingent that included NAMBLA; and at the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) conference in New York that same week, which expelled NAMBLA (despite Harry’s vocal protests and subsequent disgust) under pressure from U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, the Clinton administration, gay congressman Barney Frank, and the gay and lesbian assimilationist organizations.

"Of course, Harry stood for much more than the comments published here.  But these views were also important to him, as his moving expressions of love for Matt, the man in his life as a boy, make clear."

As for Thorstad, for more than six years, he "was a member of the Upper West Side branch of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and a staff writer for its newspaper, The Militant. He left the SWP in December 1973, citing the organization's lack of enthusiasm for the gay liberation movement and failure to develop a "Marxist materialist analysis" of it. In 1976 he self-published a collection of internal party documents relating to its discussion of the gay liberation movement, under the title Gay Liberation and Socialism : Documents from the Discussions on Gay Liberation Inside the Socialist Workers Party (1970-1973). In the early 1970s Thorstad was president of the Gay Activists Alliance, a leading gay liberation group in New York,

In 1978 Thorstad was a founding member of NAMBLA, "served as a member of the Steering Committee from some undetermined time until September 1996" and was one of a group of NAMBLA members who were sued in 2000 for the wrongful death of a ten-year-old boy in a long-running court case Curley v. NAMBLA in Boston.

Here’s David Thorstad on pederasty from a speech in Mexico City, 1998:

The issue of love between men and boys has intersected the gay movement since the late nineteenth century, with the rise of the first gay rights movement in Germany. Pederasty - that is, love between a man and a youth of 12 to 18 years of age - say middle-class homosexuals, lesbians, and feminists, has nothing to do with gay liberation. Some go so far as to claim, absurdly, that it is a heterosexual phenomenon, or even "sexual abuse." What a travesty!

Pederasty is the main form that male homosexuality has acquired throughout Western civilization"

This is a man who celebrates the homosexual and pedophilic activism of Harry Hay, who was the role model and inspiration for Kevin Jennings, America’s "safe schools czar."

What’s wrong with this picture?