This is my thank-you letter to Bob Weider for his article. There was a 'cc' to the Letters To The Editor department of the San Jose Mercury News. Publication wasn't the main intent of my letter, and we'll have to wait to see if it's too harsh or too verbose for publication.

June 4, 1999

Dear Bob Wieder,

GLAAD broadcast e-mail excerpts of your article (GLAADAlert June 3, 1999), and I was impressed. I've been saying for years that the "Christian Right's" persecution of sexual minorities was rooted in their unshakeable fixation that all sex must be evil and inherently disgusting. But my deduction was empirical; I never proved it convincingly.

In such an outlook as you describe, any celebration of life may be seen as a threat to their view that the world is unnatural, and its peoples contemptible. I always interpreted attempts at legislated repression as an effort to subjugate politically for the greater glory of the Doctrine. Now I see the compulsion to "punish", which you identified, as both means and end. A world reduced to a state of perpetual punishment -- a hell on Earth -- would mean redemption for all anti-lifers, not to mention a chance to crow that "we told you this would happen to you if you didn't listen to us."

Why is "righteous" never associated with "gentle and kind"? Not content to shepherd, holy warriors have historically been trained to partition the world into exactly two camps: those believers who are with us, and all those others who acquire the irreducible default status of enemy.

Earth has witnessed before what happens when a psychotic mission to re-engineer humanity acquires the power to extinguish any threat to the rightness of the ideology. Happy, independent, well-adjusted humans are, by definition, a threat to that ideology.

Matters of race and birth and other naturally inherited characteristics have been central to most of those epochs of destruction, precisely because it is arbitrary and unfair, but freedom of choice has been the target of all such campaigns. It's not a bad idea to be aware of the possibility there are some folks in this country who embrace defamation and pogroms as the embodiment of all they believe in.

I was aware, on some level, that there are other logical connections within the fundamentalist anti-sex and anti-child orthodoxies, such as abortion issues. I do have my own web page devoted in part to articles and essays I've written on lesbian/gay issues, but I never quite made all the connections you tied together so neatly, in a single page yet.

Letters like mine, and analysis like yours, invariably seem to invite a flood of letters discrediting the authors for being "anti-religious". Millions upon millions of Americans who embrace religions of their choosing have successfully integrated their moral, spiritual and public lives, largely shunning philosophies that preach intolerance. Religion is not the issue here; political intolerance is.

Similarly, defenders of intolerance invoke their "right to be heard", condemning as hypocritical the "political correctness" of our predominantly live-and-let-live society. In a context where they are actually calling for repeal of basic existing civil equalities for minorities, the ultra-religious right would have us believe they are the injured parties here. The question is not what you believe in, but whether you would be willing to go to the wall to defame, exclude and persecute citizens who are simply different in some way from yourself.

Thus we see a "moral monopoly" of spokespersons quick to accuse gays, lesbians and liberals of "twisting" truth, decency and morality to serve a covert agenda ("I want to live"), while themselves propagandizing to restructure society beyond any point of civic debate. The world has seen this tactic before too. I wish you would do a piece on it.

My call: yours is the most concise, cogent and tightly integrated analysis in this area that I've ever seen. Brilliantly done; thanks and congratulations to you!

Sincerely,

Alex Forbes
San Mateo