The LGBT Movement’s Next Goal: “Punish the Wicked.”

By Jonathon Van Maren

Pride Month erupted across North America with more fanfare than usual this year, with the Left strangling itself with the noose of intersectionality and once-celebratory marches devolving into brawls between Black Lives Matter, trans activists, and even pro-Palestinian marchers, who successfully got the Jews kicked out of Chicago’s “Dyke March.” Understandably, activists who once defined their movements based on aspects of their identity are having a bit of trouble adjusting to an era where identity is a fluid thing, and with the ever-shifting Oppression Pyramid threatening to send some sliding to the bottom, those of us who are observing this spectacle can’t help but compare it to a snake choking on its own tail.

It was for this reason that an intern and LGBTQ supporter Elliot Kaufman penned a frustrated column over at the National Review, wondering what the Gay Pride movement was going to do now that it had been co-opted by corporations and rent asunder by dueling groups of violent victims:

The corporations were almost as grating. Every concern from Amtrak to Amazon showed up, each with its own T-shirts and no doubt its own public-relations campaign. Wells Fargo is one of the main sponsors of the D.C. march. For the past week, Uber has been bombarding me with e-mails about how much it loves the gay community. As Kevin Williamson explains in a recent cover story in National Review, all this is in the interest of corporations. In post-Christian America, support for gay rights is barely about gays anymore; rather, it functions as an identifier, a reverse mark of Cain. The wearer is on the right side of history.

However, the big companies have their work cut out for them. They are only one of the many interest-group sectors vying for a piece of the gay-rights pie — and they may have joined in too late, after it became clear which side would win. Just before them came the Democratic-party mainstream, which decided that it was safe to support gay marriage right around 2012 and 2013, and before them was the party’s progressive wing. The radical Left, on the other hand, has been supporting the gay-rights movement from the start. But can the movement posture with the radical Left and remain a big tent? Or will the inevitable infighting end up damaging and devaluing Pride? Winners of the debate on marriage, the gay-rights movement has begun to drift.

It’s a fair question: What is a movement that has accomplished nearly all of its legislative goals going to do now, especially as unifying projects are necessary to utilize new “allies” and quell infighting? It’s also a question that can be answered simply by taking a look at what some of the most influential architects of the gay rights movement have been openly telling reporters at every opportunity: They’re going to go after the Christians. From the Christian Post:

A prominent LGBT activist who has donated more than anyone else to LGBT causes has said that “wicked” people who advocate for laws protecting the religious freedom of conservative Christians to act in accordance with their views on marriage and sexuality need to be “punished.”

The Rolling Stone recently published a lengthy profile piece examining the contributions of Tim Gill, a software entrepreneur who has quietly been at the forefront of the push for same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in the United States over the past several decades.

The article explained how Gill, who is gay, has spent over $422 million to advance the LGBT cause and explained the impact that his associated organizations such as the Gill Foundation, Gill Action, and OutGiving have made on LGBT advocacy in America.

“Gill’s fingerprints are on nearly every major victory in the march to marriage, from the 2003 Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health case, which made Massachusetts the first state to allow same-sex marriage, to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision two decades later that legalized it in all 50,” Andy Kroll explained for Rolling Stone. “‘Without a doubt,’ says Mary Bonauto, the attorney who argued the Obergefell case, ‘we would not be where we are without Tim Gill and the Gill Foundation.'”

But now that same-sex marriage has been legalized nationally by the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling, Gill, has continued to push forward in his effort to ensure that LGBT people are not discriminated against, even if that means opposing political efforts in states to grant religious exemptions to business owners or government employees who feel it violates their faith to participate in a same-sex wedding.

According to Rolling Stone, Gill and his allies have set their eyes on the “new front of the movement,” calling it a campaign that “pits LGBTQ advocates against a religious right that responded to marriage equality by redoubling its efforts.”

More specifically, Gill’s efforts are now focused on southern states, where according to the American Civil Liberties Union, one-third of LGBT people in America live. Many of those states have few or no legal discrimination protections for LGBT people.

The Rolling Stone piece asserts that the election of President Donald Trump, who has filled his administration with social conservative proponents of traditional marriage, has “only emboldened those looking to erase the gains of the past decade.”

“We’re going into the hardest states in the country,” the Rolling Stone article quoted Gill as saying. “We’re going to punish the wicked.”

Got that? The LGBTQ lobby now plans to “punish the wicked”—and in case you didn’t get that, “the wicked” are those of us who support traditional marriage, business owners who don’t want to participate in gay wedding celebrations, politicians who support religious liberty, and churches that still hold to traditional sexual orthodoxy. Gay rights activists never believed their “don’t legislate morality” trope—they simply wanted the opportunity to legislate their morality, as I detailed in Chapter 8 of my recent book The Culture War. Now that the tide has turned and post-Christian America has arrived, the moral relativism the secularists spread so industriously has metastasized into a New Morality, one that turns everything we previously understood about sexuality, marriage, and human nature on its head. Gill and his rainbow storm troopers are just getting started:

Gill and his allies have worked to oppose state ordinances, such as North Carolina’s House Bill 2. H.B. 2, which has since been repealed and replaced under the state’s new Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper, effectively made it so no local government could enact an ordinance forcing businesses to allow transgender men and women to access showers, locker rooms and restrooms that are not consistent with their biological sex.

As the Rolling Stone piece explained that Gill, 63, looks to spend “every last dollar in the foundation’s coffers” in pursuit of LGBT equality before he dies, he contended in the interview that the need for LGBT advocacy will never go away.

“You have to educate every single generation about this and make sure it doesn’t creep back into our society,” Gill is quoted as saying. “There’s no sense in which the job is ever done.”

During a question-and-answer session at Yale University in 2012, Gill was explicitly asked by a student about the need to engage in dialogue with Republicans and opponents of gay marriage in order to advance social change.

“Go back to the 50’s, no one was on our side. … no one was on our side and everyone was our enemy. You have to engage somewhere. The problem is there are enough people on the side of gay people now that you could become very comfortable and say, ‘I will only deal with liberals or Democrats or whatever,'” he said. “There are five percent of people who are irrefutably forever our enemy and everybody else is our future friend. The question is what trajectory are we on to change them from being our enemy to becoming our friend.”

Gill’s comments about punishing the “wicked” come at a time in which conservative Christian business owners have suffered the consequences of standing up for their religious beliefs on marriage and sexuality.

The LGBTQ movement’s new corporate allies may make less-extremist members like Kaufman somewhat queasy, but they are enormously helpful in putting pressure on the Republicans when they attempt to pass religious freedom legislation, pitting the big business wing of the GOP against the social conservative wing, a shaky political marriage that is already disintegrating. Next up is LGBTQ-friendly education in schools, from kindergarten onwards, and the destruction of traditional values in North America is well on its way.

Christians need to realize that the gay rights movement has no intention of “living and let live.” Those who thought that the debate over gay marriage may have put an unsatisfactory end to a nasty battle in the culture war must think again. These activists are not satisfied with letting Christian go about their business, attend church on Sundays, raise their families, and run their own Christian schools or home-schooling groups. They will enforce the New Morality with McCarthy-esque enthusiasm, and it is essential that we wake up and fight back. Resentful eyes are on the Shire, and Christians must be warned that their very way of life is already under attack.
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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.