Tactics of the Homosexual Movement

1987 “Overhauling of Straight America”

Detailed Strategy for public acceptance of Homosexuals

by J. Vennari

In late February 2011, Barack Obama announced that he and his Justice Department would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA], claiming the act was “unconstitutional”. The 1996 Act states that in federal law, “the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.”[1] It prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex “marriages” for the purpose of taxes, social security and other programs.

It appears obvious Obama is working to clear a path for federal recognition of what is called same-sex “marriage”. The Supreme Court is now hearing cases on this topic. Recent polls indicate that an increasing number of Americans find same-sex “marriage” acceptable, which indicates America’s slide from acceptance of the most basic precepts of natural and Divine law.

Obama’s recent statements regarding DOMA provide the opportunity to pose the question: how is it that homosexuality and same-sex “marriage” is now accepted by so many individuals?

There are various contributing factors, not least of which is the strategies of homosexual activists themselves.

“The Overhauling of Straight America”

Our focus here will be on the effective tactics employed by the homosexual movement, particularly spelled out in the 1987 landmark article “The Overhauling of Straight America” by homosexual activists Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill. (“Erastes Pill” was the pen name for Hunter Madsen).

Both of these men were highly educated. Kirk was a Harvard educated researcher in neuropsychiatry; Madsen had a doctorate in politics from Harvard and was an expert on public persuasion tactics and social marketing.

It is said “The Overhauling of Straight America” has become the “bible” of the homosexual movement, as it presents strategies both to make homosexuals more acceptable, and to demonize opponents of homosexuality. The entire campaign is based not on intellectual arguments, but on emotional manipulation of the public.  (Kirk & Madsen later expanded the principles in the article to a 398-page book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s).

For now, we will focus on their original 1987 article. In order to convey the true spirit of the piece, we will rely as much as possible on direct quotation.

Published in the 1987 edition of Guide, a homosexual publication, “The Overhauling of Straight America” begins:

“The first order of business is desensitization of the American public concerning gays and gay rights. To desensitize the pubic is to help it view homosexuality with indifference instead of keen emotion.” The authors go on to note their goal to make sexual preference placed on a par with preferences in ice cream flavors or sports. You prefer chocolate, I prefer butter pecan. You prefer hockey, I prefer baseball. No problem.

“At least in the beginning”, they write, “we are seeking public desensitization and nothing more. We do not need and cannot expect full ‘appreciation’ or ‘understanding’ of homosexuality from the average America. You can forget about trying to persuade the masses that homosexuality is a good thing. But if you can only get them to think that is just another thing, with a shrug of the shoulders, then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won. And to get to shoulder-shrug state, gays as a class must cease to appear mysterious, alien and contrary.” The article calls for a massive media campaign to change the image of homosexuals, “and any campaign to accomplish this turnaround should accomplish six things.”

The following six steps are directly lifted from the Kirk/Pill article:

Step 1: Talk About Gays and Gayness as Loudly and as Often as Possible

“The principle behind this advice is simple”, say Kirk and Pill, “almost any behavior begins to look normal if you are exposed to enough of it at close quarters and among your acquaintances. The acceptability of the new behavior will ultimately hinge on the number of one’s fellows doing it or accepting it.” A person may be offended initially by the novelty of it all, but the authors point out “as long as Joe-Six-pack feels little pressure to perform likewise, and as long as the behavior in question presents little threat to his physical and financial security, he soon gets used to it and life goes on.” As time goes on, Joe-Six pack and his friends will become more tolerant of homosexuality as no more than an alternative, legitimate way of life.

“The way to benumb raw sensibilities about homosexuality is to have a lot of people talk a great deal about the subject in a neutral or supportive way.” The more it is talked about, the more the impression is created that public opinion is at least divided on the topic. “Even rancorous debates between opponents and defenders serve our purpose so long as ‘respectable’ gays are front and center to make their own pitch.”

The authors also insist that this talk about “gayness” must be talk, not homosexualist indoctrination. “In the early stages of any campaign to reach straight American, the masses should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex should be downplayed and gay rights should be reduced to an abstract social question as much as possible.”

The authors stress the importance of having homosexual issues talked about in the visual media, film and television, which are “the most powerful image-makers in Western civilization.” At the time, the average American spent a good seven hours or more per day in front of the TV. “Those hours open a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan horse might be passed.”

Hollywood is described by the authors as the best covert weapon homosexuals have to desensitize the mainstream. They applaud the fact that over the past 10 years (up to 1987) homosexual characters have become prominent in films and television programs.

Since then, these characters have become even more common, and it is all part of the strategy to mobilize public acceptance of homosexuality. Witness, for example, television’s Will & Grace or The L Word; movies such as Brokeback Mountain, and likable homosexual characters with prominent roles in films such as Bridget Jones Diary and As Good As it Gets. Amiable homosexual characters increasingly feature in modern film and television, and it is no accident.

Kirk and Pill then lay out their full scale assault on religion. “While public opinion is one primary source of mainstream values, religious authority is the other. When conservative churches condemn gays, there are only two things we can do to confound the homophobia of true believers. First we can use talk to muddy the moral waters. This means publicizing support for gays by more moderate churches, raising theological objections of our own about conservative interpretation of Biblical teaching and exposing hatred and inconsistency.”

They continue, “Second, we can undermine the moral authority of homophobic churches by portraying them as antiquated and backwards, badly out of step with the times and with the latest findings of psychology. Against the mighty pull of institutional Religion one must set the mightier draw of Science and Public Opinion (the shield and swords of that accursed ‘secular humanism’). Such an unholy alliance has worked well against churches before, on such topics as divorce and abortion. With enough open talk about the prevalence and acceptability of homosexuality, that alliance can work here again.”[3]

Step 2: Portray Gays as Victims, Not as Aggressive Challengers

“In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector. If gays are presented, instead, as a strong and prideful tribe promoting a rigidly nonconformist and deviant lifestyle, they are more likely to be seen as a public menace that justifies resistance and oppression. For that reason, we must forego the temptation to strut our ‘gay pride’ publicly when it conflicts with the Gay Victim image. And we must walk the fine line between impressing straights with our great numbers, on the one hand, and sparking their hostile paranoia —’They are all around us!’ — on the other.

“A media campaign to promote the Gay Victim image should make use of symbols which reduce the mainstream’s sense of threat, which lower its guard, and which enhance the plausibility of victimization. In practical terms, this means that jaunty mustachioed musclemen would keep very low profile in gay commercials and other public presentations, while sympathetic figures of nice young people, old people, and attractive women would be featured. (It almost goes without saying that groups on the farthest margin of acceptability such as NAMBLA, [North American Man-Boy Love Association] must play no part at all in such a campaign: suspected child-molesters will never look like victims).”

Kirk & Pill outline two different messages about the “Gay Victim” that must be communicated. “First, the mainstream should be told that gays are victims of fate, in the sense that most never had a choice to accept or reject their sexual preference. The message must read: ‘As far as gays can tell, they were born gay, just as you were born heterosexual or white or black or bright or athletic. Nobody ever tricked or seduced them; they never made a choice, and are not morally blameworthy. What they do isn’t willfully contrary – it’s only natural for them. This twist of fate could as easily have happened to you!’”

Kirk and Pill continue, “Straight viewers must be able to identify with gays as victims. Mr. and Mrs. Public must be given no extra excuses to say, ‘they are not like us.’ To this end, the persons featured in the public campaign should be decent and upright, appealing and admirable by straight standards, completely unexceptionable in appearance — in a word, they should be indistinguishable from the straights we would like to reach. (To return to the terms we have used in previous articles, spokesmen for our cause must be R-type ‘straight gays’ rather than Q-type ‘homosexuals on display.’) Only under such conditions will the message be read correctly: ‘These folks are victims of a fate that could have happened to me’.”

The authors go on to note that homosexuals may not look favorably on a strategy that makes them look like victims of some sort of plague, “but the plain fact is that the gay community is weak and must manipulate the powers of the weak, including the play for sympathy.”

“The second message would portray gays as victims of society.”

Step 3: Give Protectors a Just Cause.

“A media campaign that casts gays as society’s victims and encourages straights to be their protectors must make it easier for those to respond to assert and explain their new protectiveness. Few straight women, and even fewer straight men, will want to defend homosexuality boldly as such. Most would rather attach their awakened protective impulse to some principle of justice or law, to some general desire for consistent and fair treatment in society. Our campaign should not demand direct support for homosexual practices, should instead take anti-discrimination as its theme. The right to free speech, freedom of beliefs, freedom of association, due process and equal protection of laws-these should be the concerns brought to mind by our campaign.

“It is especially important for the gay movement to hitch its cause to accepted standards of law and justice because its straight supporters must have at hand a cogent reply to the moral arguments of its enemies. The homophobes clothe their emotional revulsion in the daunting robes of religious dogma, so defenders of gay rights must be ready to counter dogma with principle.”

Step 4: Make Gays Look Good

“In order to make a Gay Victim sympathetic to straights you have to portray him as Everyman. But an additional theme of the campaign should be more aggressive and upbeat: to offset the increasingly bad press that these times have brought to homosexual men and women, the campaign should paint gays as superior pillars of society. Yes, yes, we know — this trick is so old it creaks. Other minorities use it all the time in ads that announce proudly, ‘Did you know that this Great Man (or Woman) was ____?’ But the message is vital for all those straights who still picture gays as ‘queer’ people — shadowy, lonesome, fail, drunken, suicidal, child-snatching misfits.”

The authors stress the importance of Celebrity endorsement. “The celebrities can be straight” (such as Ed Asner) “or gay”

Step 5: Make the Victimizers look Bad

“At a later stage of the media campaign for gay rights — long after other gay ads have become commonplace — it will be time to get tough with remaining opponents. To be blunt, they must be vilified. (This will be all the more necessary because, by that time, the entrenched enemy will have quadrupled its output of vitriol and disinformation.) Our goal here is twofold. First, we seek to replace the mainstream’s self-righteous pride about its homophobia with shame and guilt. Second, we intend to make the antigays look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.[4]

“The public should be shown images of ranting homophobes whose secondary traits and beliefs disgust middle America. These images might include: the Ku Klux Klan demanding that gays be burned alive or castrated; bigoted southern ministers drooling with hysterical hatred to a degree that looks both comical and deranged; menacing punks, thugs, and convicts speaking coolly about the ‘fags’ they have killed or would like to kill; a tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed.

The authors later explain, “We have already indicated some of the images which might be damaging to the homophobic vendetta: ranting and hateful religious extremists neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klansmen made to look evil and ridiculous (hardly a difficult task).

“These images should be combined with those of their gay victims by a method propagandists call the ‘bracket technique.’ For example, for a few seconds an unctuous beady-eyed Southern preacher is seen pounding the pulpit in rage about ‘those sick, abominable creatures.’ While his tirade continues over the soundtrack, the picture switches to pathetic photos of gays who look decent, harmless, and likable; and then we cut back to the poisonous face of the preacher, and so forth. The contrast speaks for itself. The effect is devastating.

Step 6: Solicit Funds: The Buck Stops Here

“Any massive campaign of this kind would require unprecedented expenditures for months or even years — an unprecedented fundraising drive,” say the authors. They call upon homosexuals to contribute heavily to this campaign. “And because those gays not supporting families usually have more discretionary income than average, they could afford to contribute much more.”

They go on to say, “the appeal should be directed both at gays and at straights who care about social justice.”

Two years later in their book After the Ball, Kirk and Madsen stated clearly their plan for mass propaganda for converting America to promote the homosexual cause. They write, “….by conversion we mean something far more profoundly threatening to the American Way of Life, without which no truly  sweeping social change can occur. We mean conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.”[5]

We have been manipulated and corrupted.

Notes:

[1] “House Speaker Convenes Bipartisan Group to Defend DOMA Abandoned by Obama”, Life Site News, March 8, 2011. [2] Not to mention the strong presence of homosexuals in the Church that followed the Vatican II revolution. [3] Emphasis added. [4] Emphasis added. [5] After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen [New York: Penguin, 1989], p. 153.

“….by conversion [toward public acceptance of homosexuality] we mean something far more profoundly threatening to the American Way of Life, without which no truly sweeping social change can occur. We mean conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.” – Kirk & Madsen, After the Ball, page. 153.

Original article from homosexual webpage: “The Overhauling of Straight America”

Homosexual Journalist: “Can We Please Just Start Admitting  That We Do Actually Want To Indoctrinate Kids?” (Warning, vile content! Linked from homosexual website. Apologies. Not for anyone under 18. This is only linked to show the true face of the homosexual movement.)    – from the article: “I and a lot of other people want to indoctrinate, recruit, teach and expose children to queer sexuality AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.” – Daniel Villarreal

 

http://www.cfnews.org/page10/page92/hom-tactics.html