Why Nashville Should Reject the 'Sexual Orientation' Law      3/4/2003
By Robert Knight

The Boy Scouts Will Be Only the First Casualty

The Nashville, Tennessee, City Council is considering adding “sexual orientation” to its nondiscrimination code. Sold as “tolerance,” such a law leads directly to discrimination against people who think it is wrong for men to have sex with men and women to have sex with women.

“Sexual orientation” laws hijack civil rights and ensure persecution of the Boy Scouts. This has been the pattern from California to Maine to Florida.

People who engage in homosexual behavior have the same rights as other citizens, but should not be given additional rights based on their willingness to perform peculiar–and often medically dangerous–sex acts.

Like other terms that swiftly achieve usage, “sexual orientation” is rarely examined. Yet “sexual orientation” is a radical challenge to the beliefs of all major religious faiths because it attacks the notion that sexual behavior has moral dimensions.

The underlying concept of “sexual orientation” is that all sexual behavior is equally valid. There are no good choices or bad choices, just inclinations. “Sexual orientation” laws are the legal embodiment of the old ’60s slogan, “If it feels good, do it.”

The orthodox Christian view is that people who embrace sinful behavior as an identity are to be confronted with their sin like any other sinner, and assisted to overcome it. They are to be encouraged to repent of their sin and avail themselves of the healing power of Jesus Christ. “Empowering” a particular sin serves only to trap sinners and encourage them to continue sinning. That is why supporting “gay rights” is the opposite of Christian compassion.

It is said that lack of acceptance has driven some young, sexually confused people to suicide. Every suicide is a tragedy. But could it be that they did so not because of societal “homophobia,” but because they were told by “gay” activists that they were “born gay” and had no hope of change?

Societal Implications

When such a naked rebuke to the moral order like “sexual orientation” is inserted into the law, protections for the institutions of marriage and family cannot long survive. Traditional morality is recast as a form of “bigotry,” and “sexual orientation” becomes a springboard for more “gay” activism.

Nashville’s religious groups are being offered a “religious exemption” from the proposed ordinance. They shouldn’t buy it. If it is wrong for this immoral policy to be forced on the churches, it is wrong to force it on other citizens as well. This is not like taxation, which is a necessary and Biblically prescribed government function from which churches and other nonprofit organizations are exempt. It is a matter of turning immorality into law, thus turning ordinary people into outlaws.

Religious exemptions are ultimately worthless. A District of Columbia human rights commission ordered Georgetown University, a Catholic college, to violate church doctrine and sponsor a pro-homosexual group on campus. A court agreed, saying the District’s “sexual orientation” law overrode the school’s religious freedom. It didn’t matter that neither “sexual orientation” nor sodomy are protected in the Constitution or that religion is specifically protected. In the hands of liberal judges, “sexual orientation” takes on a life of its own.

Other Targets of ‘Gay’ Activism

Portland, Maine, city officials recently canceled a grant for a Salvation Army meals-on-wheels program for senior citizens. Why? As a Christian denomination, the Salvation Army won’t provide marital benefits to homosexual employees, thus running afoul of the city’s “sexual orientation” law.

When the Portland “sexual orientation” ordinance was introduced, proponents argued, as they do in Nashville today, that it would merely ensure that “people won’t be fired for being ‘gay.’” Now it is being used to promote “gay marriage,” bash the Boy Scouts and discriminate against Christian groups that hold to Biblical teaching.

Unlike the sorry history of Jim Crow laws, there is no evidence that discrimination against homosexuals is so widespread that it requires a radical restructuring of civil rights. People are far more likely to be fired for objecting to “gay” activism in companies than for “being gay.”

Homosexual activists used to deny that they had anything to do with men demanding the right to wear dresses. But U.S. homosexual pressure groups have now added “transgender” rights to their list. Their goal is to create grounds for lawsuits on the basis of sexual confusion and cross-dressing, even in schools.

Assailing the Scouts

The first victims of any “sexual orientation” law are the Boy Scouts, who have good reason to keep their leadership free from men attracted sexually to males. For some insight on this, check out the recent troubles of the Boston Diocese of the Catholic Church.

“Sexual orientation” laws turn the Boy Scouts into bad guys overnight. In California, the state Supreme Court is considering banning all state judges from associating with the Boy Scouts because the Scouts are exempt from a statewide “sexual orientation” law. Good judges (mostly fathers) are being told to hang up their gavels or stop associating with this “hate group.” This is tolerance?

Even though they won a U.S. Supreme Court case in June 2000 that affirmed that the Boy Scouts of America have a right to set their own membership standards, the Scouts have been under attack in many places for resisting homosexuals’ demands for inclusion. In virtually all cases, critics of the Scouts point to laws or policies containing the term “sexual orientation.”

· In September, 2002 the Berkeley, California, City Council pulled the low-cost lease for city dock space for the Sea Scouts, saying that the group is associated with the Boy Scouts, and thereby violates the city’s “sexual orientation” law.

· In June, 2001, The District of Columbia’s Commission on Human Rights fined the Scouts $100,000 and ordered them to reinstate two openly homosexual leaders. That decision was overturned in court, but the Scouts paid heavy legal fees.

· In Broward County, Florida, in March 2001, the Scouts were forced to sue after county commissioners barred their access to public schools in the fall of 2000.

· The Ann Arbor, Michigan City Council cut ties in August 2001 to the local United Way for their refusal to eject the Scouts from the United Way program.

· More than two dozen chapters of United Way have cut off the Scouts, and at least 359 school districts with a total of 4,418 schools in 10 states have taken action against the Scouts, according to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

· Former Vice President Al Gore pledged someday to use the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act – a bill to empower the federal government to ban discrimination based on “sexual orientation” in all workplaces with 15 or more employees, to force the Scouts to admit homosexuals.

Despite all the media-driven attacks, most Americans support the Scouts’ right to set their own moral standards. In an October 2000 Chicago Tribune poll of Chicago-area residents, “82 percent said the Scouts should be allowed to meet in schools and other public buildings. Only 10 percent disagreed, and 7 percent had no opinion.”

The Radical Meaning of “Sexual Orientation”

While other human activities, such as buying and selling, remain subject to moral judgments, the concept of “sexual orientation” places sex outside morality. No other human behavior with such sweeping consequences has received such a stamp of neutrality.

Springing from the psychological literature, “sexual orientation” is often taken to mean “homosexuality.” Given that its inclusion in policies is the work of homosexual pressure groups, that is a reasonable deduction. However, the two words constitute an umbrella term for numerous sexual behaviors, including paraphilias, which are sexual disorders.

According to the therapeutic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, there are at least 20 distinctive sexual variations of “sexual orientation,” and perhaps many more.

Few public officials and businessmen realize that when they allow the addition of “sexual orientation” to their nondiscrimination codes, they are tying their own hands when it comes to objecting to:

· A man in a highly visible sales job coming to work in a dress and high heels;

· A woman in a highly visible position coming to work in men’s clothes;

· A person of indeterminate sex who insists on using either the men’s room or the women’s room;

· A person of either sex who indulges a taste for extreme sexual promiscuity and pornography during working hours despite being charged with representing the company’s tone and character;

· A man who frequents prostitutes while on business trips and claims that it is none of the company’s business, regardless of the company’s public image.

Going After the Salvation Army

Another organization that has run afoul of laws containing “sexual orientation” is the Salvation Army, perhaps America’s most respected charity. In 1997, the Salvation Army gave up $3.5 million in San Francisco city funding rather than submit to an order for them to offer “domestic partner” benefits to homosexual employees.

In Washington, D.C., a homosexual D.C. City Councilman boasted in crude terms in July 2001 about how he threatened Salvation Army officials over their policy on “sexual orientation.”

Recalling a conversation with a national Salvation Army official, David Catania related:

I said this faggot [referring to himself] controls federal grants in the District as well as local and you’ll never see another cent as long as you live. I’ll subpoena every one of you mother [expletive]s and I’ll bring you down and I’ll turn my chamber into a national circus. Do we understand each other?

Does Nashville really want to open up the city to this kind of abuse of power?

Cracking Down in Canada

We need look no farther than our neighbor to the north to see what America’s future may hold as “sexual orientation” policies and laws proliferate. Unlike the United States, Canada does not have a First Amendment to protect the freedoms of speech, press, religion and free assembly. But Canadians share many cultural similarities with Americans, so their experience with “sexual orientation” contains clues about where the concept eventually leads.

· Section 319 of Canada’s Criminal Code banning “public incitement of hatred and promoting hatred” has been used against people who are critical of homosexuality.

· Dianne Haskett, the mayor of London, Ontario, was brought before the Ontario Human Rights Commission for declining to declare “Gay Pride Weekend.” She and the city were fined a total of $10,000. (Later, in an election in which her opponent backed “gay rights,” Mayor Haskett prevailed in a landslide.)

· A Saskatchewan newspaper publisher and a man who bought an ad featuring a list of five biblical verses about homosexuality were fined $4,500 each and warned never to run a similar ad.

· The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has warned major U.S. broadcasters such as Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family that Canadian stations may carry their programs only after excising any segment dealing with homosexuality. Following a 1997 Focus on the Family program in which panelists discussed scientific claims about genetic studies and homosexuality as well as the aims and activities of homosexual pressure groups, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council issued a statement saying that Focus on the Family “attributed to the gay movement a false and flimsy intellectual basis and a malevolent, insidious and conspiratorial purpose, which, in the view of the Council, constitute abusively discriminatory comment on the basis of ‘sexual orientation.’”

Within the past year, major homosexual activist organizations have added “transgender” discrimination to their list of causes. This means that they are serious about creating grounds for lawsuits on the basis of sexual confusion and cross-dressing.

“Sexual orientation” is a wildly expansive term (see appendix) that can encompass virtually any sexual temptation known to man. If Nashville’s public officials succeed in adding “sexual orientation” to the city’s nondiscrimination code, they will provide instant legal special rights to any kind of sexual behavior, however perverse.

Most assuredly, they will guarantee that the Boy Scouts will find themselves in the cross-hairs of homosexual activists demanding the “right” to take boys out on camping trips.

***

Robert Knight, who earned the rank of Eagle Scout, is director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America, and a board member of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays.

March 2003

Appendix 1: “Sexual Orientations”

Warning: some of the descriptions may be offensive to readers’ sensibilities.

{Page numbers are from “ Paraphilias,” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), pp. 566-582.}

1. Heterosexuality: the universal norm: sexual interaction with the opposite sex.

2. Homosexuality or “Gay”: sexual interaction with persons of the same sex.

3. Bisexuality: sexual interaction with both males and females.

4. Transgenderism: an umbrella term referring to and/or covering transvestitism, drag queen/kings, and transsexualism.

5. Pedophilia: “sexual activity with a prepubescent child (generally age 13 years or younger). The individual with Pedophilia must be age 16 years or older and at least 5 years older than the child. For individuals in late adolescence with Pedophilia, no precise age difference is specified, and clinical judgment must be used; both the sexual maturity of the child and the age difference must be taken into account.” (p.571)

6. Transsexuality: the condition in which a person’s “gender” identity is different from his or her anatomical sex.

7. Transvestitism: the condition in which a person is sexually stimulated or gratified by wearing the clothes of the other sex.

8. Transvestic fetishism: for males, “intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving cross-dressing.” (p. 575)

9. Autogynephilia: the sexual arousal of a man by his own perception of himself as a woman or dressed as a woman. (p. 574)

10. Voyeurism: “obtaining sexual arousal through the act of observing unsuspecting individuals, usually strangers, who are naked, in the process of disrobing, or engaging in sexual activity.” (p. 575)

11. Exhibitionism: “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving the exposure of one’s genitals to an unsuspecting stranger.” (p. 569)

12. Fetishism or Sexual Fetishism: “intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving the use of nonliving objects (e.g. female undergarments).” (p. 570)

13. Zoophilia: becoming excited by and/or engaging in sexual activity with animals. (p. 576)

14. Sexual Sadism: “recurrent, intense, sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving acts (real, not simulated) in which the psychological or physical suffering (including humiliation) of the victim is sexually exciting to the person.” (p. 574)

15. Sexual Masochism: “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving the act (real, not simulated) of being humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer.” (p. 573)

16. Necrophilia: sexual arousal and/or activity with a corpse. (p. 576)

17. Klismaphilia: erotic pleasure derived from enemas. (p. 576)

18. Telephone Scatalogia: the compulsion to utter obscene topics over the phone. (p. 576)

19. Urophilia: sexual arousal associated with urine. (p. 576)

20. Coprophilia: sexual arousal associated with feces. (p. 576)

21. Partialism: “sexual arousal obtained through exclusive focus on part of the body.”(p. 576)

22. Gender Identity Disorder: “a strong and persistent cross-gender identification, which is the desire to be, or the insistence that one is, of the other sex,” along with “persistent discomfort about one’s assigned sex or a sense of the inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex.” (p. 576)

23. Frotteurism: “touching and rubbing against a nonconsenting person.” (p. 570)

Appendix 2: San Francisco 2002

San Francisco was among the first cities to adopt “sexual orientation” as a civil rights category. The move gave homosexual activists the political and legal clout to stop many sound medical approaches to curbing the AIDS epidemic, such as screening donors at blood banks, conducting partner contact tracing and ensuring early diagnosis (testing). While blood banks resumed testing after a skirmish in the early 1980s, the city continued to place its bet on politically correct “safe sex” education, which prescribes condoms for virtually all sexual activities. Last year, the city handed out free passes to sex clubs in return for HIV testing. A longtime observer of the AIDS epidemic remarked of the recipients, “So if they aren't infected they can use their pass from the city health department to go get infected. If they are infected, they can use the pass to help infect others. How is that for a public health program?” Several drug companies, which stand to profit from any increase in AIDS cases, helped fund the project.

Since the 1980s, San Francisco’s “safe sex” approach has been a spectacular failure, with thousands of lives lost and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) of all kinds skyrocketing.

According to the most recently released data (December 2002) from the city's health department, the San Francisco approach to preventing HIV/STDs continues to fail. The city is experiencing across the board increases in STDs and a dramatic decline in the number of HIV tests being performed at public clinics.

Specifically:

· Gonorrhea is increasing, with a significant rise in male rectal gonorrhea (Often cited as a marker of increased 'unsafe' sex);

· Syphilis cases have more than doubled over the past year;

· Hundreds more cases of chlamydia have been reported over the previous year;

· The number of HIV cases diagnosed has increased at the same time the number of HIV tests conducted has dropped dramatically by more than half.

Clearly the city is failing to prevent, or even contain, the spread of HIV and other STDs. It appears, rather, as if the city is driving people away from being tested for HIV. The increase in rectal gonorrhea and HIV also indicates that the “safe sex” campaigns funded in part by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have failed to increase condom use or decrease STDs.

In short, despite millions in tax money spent on HIV/STD prevention in San Francisco, HIV/STD cases are up, condom use is down and HIV testing has declined dramatically.

The report can be viewed on-line at: http://www.dph.sf.ca.us/Reports/STD/STD0211.pdf

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