We recently made two presentations at Catholic University in Washington DC: one on the importance of children’s rights and considering more than statistics to understand them; the other on the importance of resisting totalitarian silencing tactics and the hijacking of civil discourse.
Then the questions began. We got two general patterns of questions:
- A lot of dubious statistics that had little or nothing to do with the presentation (for instance, an LGBT meme claiming 40 percent of homeless teens are gay, which isn’t relevant to the central point that children have a right to be born free and know their origins).
- Totalitarian silencing tactics and the hijacking of civil discourse
Our night ended with a group of white men chanting at a queer of color and a female: “racist, sexist, antigay! Christian fascists, go away!”
That was the night. Yeah, really.
Forget the International Day of the Child
Okay, maybe you want more details. It was the International Day of the Child, a day established in the 1950s by the beloved United Nations to remember the rights of children. November 20 was also—as someone in the audience reminded—International Transgender Remembrance Day, a day founded a few years ago to talk about the fraction of less than 0.1 percent of 0.1 percent of 0.1 percent of 0.1 percent of human beings who are allegedly killed just for being transgender. Proportionality seems to have gone out the window due to the irony of a small group of activists obsessed with gender transitioning who hijacked a day that was established to observe the rights of every young human being ever born (or ever died.)
Children’s rights advocate Robert Oscar Lopez addressed the small group about the recent history of a new children’s rights movement. It’s based on pushing back against the artificial reproductive technologies lobby, certain exploitative and lucrative adoption lobbies, and the gay and lesbian lobby, all of which seek to make it easier to buy biomaterials or children in order to meet a market demand for kids.
Bobby, who happens to be a professor of English literature, began by talking about an academic dilemma: social scientists have a strong tendency to come up with statistics supporting policies that fail on humanitarian grounds. For instance, in the social sciences, statistics are used to claim children do just as well with or without relationships to their biological parents. Yet we know from vast reams of literature and human experience that children feel an intense longing to know who they come from. This reality should not be dismissed just because it is not quantifiable.
According to Bobby, the solution to this problem in discourse is to focus more on the humanities, especially integrating perspectives from literature, law, history, and philosophy. He played a slide show featuring 80 photos of research galleries about great literature in the past from Ovid to Hawthorne, narratives about the timeless yearning people have to connect with their mother and father.
How ‘Stepford Husbands’ Use Human Needs to Quash Dissent
Then came Stella Morabito’s presentation. She applied her expertise in totalitarian thought control regimes and showed how political correctness silences people and blocks folks from speaking openly about children’s rights—or anything else that might be a subject of PC-dictated controversy. The basic idea was that the ability to speak out can conflict with the primal human need to feel connected to others. The threat of being cast out and isolated often determines whether people remain silent or speak up.
Political correctness is all about cultivating that fear. It’s all about manipulating the human need for warmth and connection with others by threatening to isolate anyone who doesn’t abide by the PC agenda. And PC agendas are nothing more than power-consolidation schemes. They tend to collapse quickly when subject to scrutiny or real debate. So dissenting views must be suppressed for PC agendas to survive. The most effective way to do this is by threatening non-personhood on anyone who doesn’t get with the program. Smears—such as “racist, sexist, anti-gay!”—are intended to produce this effect.
By inducing fear in order to prevent dissent, controllers can manufacture and sustain a spiral of silence. The spiral of silence thus manufactures “public opinion” in a cascade for the power-consolidating agenda. It all culminates in public policy that centralizes power for the dictators of PC agendas.
We might also look at such dictators as “Stepford husbands.” They try to control or “improve” all others as the Stepford husbands of fiction worked to control and “improve” their wives. The wives are programmed to do as they’re told. And to love it. Thus a cult mindset is born. In this way, Stepford-controlled lobbies (such as the Human Rights Campaign, or HRC, and GLAAD) can organize and program many a little army of rainbow-toting robots to go from venue to venue to shout down dissenting views. Sadly, they don’t seem to know how to do anything else.
A Queer Hijacking Begins
We gave our talks without incident, but the rainbows began to show their colors during the question and answer period. None of the critics cared to ask specifically about the material discussed. That’s not surprising, perhaps, because they were way too busy giving us a complimentary dramatization of Stella’s talk about totalitarian silencing tactics. It began with “questions” intended to accuse and smear and which were irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
There were a couple of decent questions, probably from the students who were part of the Anscombe Society, which hosted the event. The Anscombe Society, by the way, is all about standing up for traditional marriage and family. Elizabeth Anscombe, for whom it’s named, was an eminent twentieth-century philosopher and mother of seven. She was a staunch Catholic, too. Oh, did we mention that the talk took place at Catholic University? (Where people likely organized from off-campus feel welcome to shout: “Christian fascists, go away!”)
But for the most part, the LGBT-programmed Stepford students insisted on hijacking the question and answer session, especially pestering Bobby. There was a question on homeless gay kids and other shifts away from the topic at hand. The fellow leading the pack was particularly obsessed with Bobby’s blog, and became angry over an article critical of the Human Rights Campaign (an exclusively LGBT organization) for being akin to a totalitarian organization. And so on.
Now you may well be wondering why imported or coached LGBT activists would want to protest a gathering focused on children’s rights, the dangers of child trafficking, and the silencing of dissent. Two reasons: First, the way this biology thing works, two people of the same sex can never conceive babies on their own. (Yes, that is true.) So the LGBT community is among the most active promoters of practices like renting the wombs of poor third-world women to gestate other women’s eggs that were selected for fertilization or implantation by homosexual couples. This way the birth mother is intentionally not the genetic mother. The problem for children is that such forms of child trafficking intentionally separate them from biological parents.
‘T’ Is for Torquemada
But just as importantly, the LGBT lobby viciously targets individuals who disagree with its dogma. Bobby is a particularly high-value target because he doesn’t fit HRC’s or GLAAD’s (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) preferred stereotype of someone who stands up for the rights of children to be born free and to know both their mother and father. They see him as a heretic since he is outspoken on this issue, fluent in several languages, and since he was raised by lesbians and identifies as bisexual. (The fact that he is also faithfully married to the mother of his children is another big strike against him.)
So a couple of months ago the HRC ran a malicious campaign against Bobby, shamelessly profiling him with a “wanted poster” sketch on their blog and stating that he was being put “On notice!” GLAAD added him to their “hate list” last year. It’s really astonishing that the HRC, an organization flush with gazillions in cash and which enjoys enormous influence and protection from President Obama’s White House, cannot abide even one voice of dissent coming from a lone man on an English professor’s salary. In the Torquemada eyes of the HRC and GLAAD, Bobby Lopez is a heretic.
But it was mostly at the end of the Q&A that all hell broke loose. The crashers had spread out, in shill-partnering fashion. Now they came together as a pre-organized pack, complete with flag-waving. They shouted “no platform!” and that Pope Francis would have never allowed such an event to take place (which is interesting, since the Vatican invited Bobby to the Humanum conference that just ended.)
Sadly, the chants, the flags, the shout-downs at the end are truly hallmarks of cult behavior. Such followers are steeped in a culture of grievance that dulls their ability to think through any hard questions of life. Regardless of how they began, the colors of the rainbow flag have all run together into a shade of muddy brown. So we ought to come to terms with the fact that LGBT activists have actually been waving brown shirts at us all along.
Visit EnglishManif, Bobby’s blog on Children’s Rights. Follow Stella on Twitter.
