Secular Sabotage
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The founders of psychotherapy certainly gave it their best shot. Rollo May said Christianity was for “weaklings,” and Eric Fromm made palpable his disdain in The Dogma of Christ. More recently, Raymond L. Lawrence has given us Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom, which employs psychoanalytic tools to understand how Christianity has “perversely demonized” sexual pleasure. Not surprisingly, this Director of Pastoral Care at the New York Council of Churches ends his book by seeming to be making light of pedophilia. “Man/boy love has never been my cup of tea, but in recent times its harmful effects on personality development have been exaggerated beyond reason or evidence.” 14 Though the secularists don’t want to admit it, this defense of child rape is the direct consequence of sexual nihilism. Strip away the Christian cultural influence from sexual ethics and what’s left is moral anarchy.
It was in the 1960s that the work of men like Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse opened up a double-barreled assault on the Christian ideal of sexual reticence. Brown’s trumpeting of sexual liberation and Marcuse’s vision of a “non-repressive civilization” were swallowed whole by libertines like Gore Vidal. He envisioned a time when “it is possible to have a mature sexual relationship with a woman on Monday, and a mature sexual relationship with a man on Tuesday, and perhaps on Wednesday have both together.” 15 Singing this tune were people like Kate Millett, a feminist whose idea of women’s rights meant obliterating all sexual taboos.
Perhaps no one hated the Christian idea of sexual restraint more than Mary Daly. She taught her students at Boston College for decades that Christianity is a form of “phallicism” and oppression. When the theological feminist was told in 1999 that she could no longer ban men from taking her classes, she quit. 16 Today, there is no better exponent of the “life-denying brutality of traditional values” than A. C. Grayling. The British writer sees Christianity’s call for sexual moderation a “crime against humanity,” traceable to St. Augustine. 17 Augustine clearly regarded lust to be a serious sin, but Grayling’s crude characterization of him is positively slanderous.
In the United States, no name is more associated with the secular worldview of human sexuality than Alfred Kinsey. He was so extreme that it once led anthropologist Margaret Mead—no sexual prude herself 18 —to say that in Kinsey’s view, there was no moral difference between a man having sex with a woman or a sheep. 19
Judith A. Reisman has spent a good part of her adult life tracking Kinsey’s work, and what she has found is sickening. Dr. Reisman maintains that in his quest to prove how natural sex is, Kinsey sexually abused over 300 children. Infants as young as two months old were sexually stimulated to trigger orgasms, and in some cases were stimulated nonstop for over 24 hours. Kinsey biographer James H. Jones does not validate everything Reisman says, but he does admit that children were masturbated and penetrated by at least one pedophile. 20 One of Kinsey’s informants, “Mr. X,” kept a record of his sexual achievements: when he wasn’t busy sexually abusing children (600 boys and 200 girls), he managed to find the time to have intercourse with 17 blood relatives, including his own grandmother. 21 Now it is one thing to note that Kinsey himself was a sadomasochistic, child-abusing, voyeuristic pervert, quite another to understand why. Fortunately, we have enough evidence to adequately answer the question.
Kinsey rebelled against what he saw as his puritanical Methodist upbringing, and he particularly rebelled against his father. According to Joseph Epstein, Kinsey was so enamored of his hedonistic beliefs that he blamed Christianity, not libertinism, for the breakdown of the modern family. Furthermore, he labeled celibacy, delayed marriage, and asceticism, but not pederasty, as “cultural perversions.” 22 It was his assistant Wardell Pomeroy who shed the most light on this issue.
In 1972, in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Pomeroy wrote that Kinsey “knew a great deal about the Judeo-Christian tradition, and he was indignant about what it had done to our culture. He often cited the inaccuracies and paranoia in which he asserted it abounded.” 23 His daughters admitted that he was totally opposed to religion, so much so that he couldn’t tolerate a moderately religious secretary working for him. Ever the hostile atheist, Kinsey even pronounced that “the whole army of religion is our central enemy.” 24
After Kinsey died in 1956, his work was given new life by the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). With seed money from the Playboy Foundation, 25 Kinsey associates like Pomeroy went to work arguing that “laws against child molestation were relics of the Victorian Age and that incest was just another outdated taboo, like adultery, homosexuality and sadomasochism.” 26 Indeed, he even maintained that incest “can sometimes be beneficial.” 27 What Pomeroy was doing was hardly under the radar of SIECUS officials: cofounder Lester Kirkendall looked forward to a day when adult-child sex was legal. It is worth noting, too, that these charges are not the stuff of right-wing ascetics. Edward Eichel, who coauthored Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, holds to a liberal and secular worldview. 28
In 1991, SIECUS issued its recommendations for sex education. “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten—12th Grade” instructed kids in kindergarten to understand that “A woman faced with an unintended pregnancy can carry the pregnancy to term and raise the baby, or place the baby for adoption, or have an abortion to end the pregnancy.” The tots were also told that “Some couples who love each other live together in the same home without getting married.” Naturally, the guidelines were pro-homosexuality, pro-abortion, and wary of religion. 29 Kids as young as five were told that “it feels good to touch parts of the body” and that “some men and women are homosexual.” Moreover, they were told that others like to “kiss, hug, touch, and engage in other sexual behavior with one another to show caring and to share sexual pleasure.” 30 Kinsey would have been proud.
Planned Parenthood is another major organization that has long harbored ill feelings toward Christianity. Founded by birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood was originally concerned about weeding out the “undesirables,” by which it meant African Americans. “Many of the colored citizens are fine specimens of humanity,” it boasted in 1932. “A good share of them, however, constitute a large percentage of Kala-mazoo’s human scrap pile.” As Rod Dreher notes, that was written in Birth Control Review, a publication that ceased in 1940 “as Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others from humanity’s ‘scrap pile’ were being herded into Nazi death camps.” 31
In one important respect, Sanger was different from today’s Planned Parenthood activists—she was antiabortion. But like her successors, she was a Catholic basher; even her sympathetic biographer, Ellen Chesler, admits that Sanger was “rabidly anti-Catholic as she grew older.” 32 Indeed she was. She regularly compared the Catholic Church to communist regimes and the Ku Klux Klan, even though she could teach the Klan a thing or two about racism. And she wasn’t shy about unloading on Al Smith when the Catholic New Yorker ran for president. An editorial in Birth Control Review warned of “tyrannical intolerance and usurpation of power exercised by office-holders born and bred in the Roman Catholic faith.” 33 Again, it was she who was the master of intolerance. She was so wildly anti-Catholic that she literally said that no Catholic “has any moral right to hold a position of authority for the State.” The blacklist was necessary, she maintained, because Catholics “cannot help but give their first allegiance to the Church.” 34
Planned Parenthood is still anti-Catholic—its International Federation has supported efforts to oust the Holy See from the United Nations on ideological grounds—but the most viciously anti-Catholic organization in the abortion industry has long been NARAL (the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action Legal, more recently known as NARAL Pro-Choice). Organized in Chicago in 1969, NARAL was initially led by Lawrence Lader, an anti-Catholic bigot. We know this, in part, because of the testimony of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of NARAL’s original members and a close confidant of Lader’s (Nathanson later reversed cours
e, became pro-life, and joined the Catholic Church). Nathanson has admitted that from the very beginning, anti-Catholicism “was probably the best strategy we had.” 35
When NARAL was founded, Lader referred to the Catholic Church as “our favorite whipping boy,” making it plain that his goal was to “bring the Catholic hierarchy out where we can fight them. That’s the real enemy.” The Catholic Church was so nefarious that Lader called it “the biggest single obstacle to peace and decency throughout all of history.” Indeed, Nathanson said that Lader’s hatred of Catholicism was visceral. “It was a comprehensive and chilling indictment of the poisonous influence of Catholicism in secular affairs from its inception until the day before yesterday,” he said. What this shows is that NARAL officials were not content to merely challenge Catholicism, they were out to annihilate it.
Nathanson admitted that, at that time, “I was far from an admirer of the Church’s role in the world chronicle, but his [Lader’s] insistent, uncompromising recitation brought to mind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It passed through my mind that if one had substituted ‘Jewish’ for ‘Catholic,’ it would have been the most vicious anti-Semitic tirade imaginable.” 36 This is strong language given that the Protocols is a libelous anti-Jewish screed.
NARAL officials were conniving enough to exploit the media’s distrust of the Catholic Church in the 1960s. In fact, Nathanson later explained that “it was an easy step to targeting the Catholic Church in its opposition to abortion as making opposition to abortion a pro-fascist, reactionary position.” 37 The strategy worked. But by 1975, two years after abortion was ruled constitutional, Lader was forced out of his position as executive director of NARAL. However, that didn’t stop him from setting up Abortion Rights Mobilization, an organization that will be remembered for its unsuccessful effort at stripping the Catholic Church of its tax-exempt status. 38
By the late 1980s, Lader was still spouting his anti-Catholic propaganda. In his book Politics, Power and the Catholic Church, he wrote that “The development of Catholic power—the influence of its religious morality and political aims on American society—has followed a careful design.… By 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the Catholic church achieved what it had only grasped for before: national power that gave the bishops more access to the White House than any other religion, and made them one of the most awesome lobbying blocs on Capitol Hill.” But if the Catholic Church was so powerful, then why was Roe v. Wade decided over its objections? Indeed, as Robert Lockwood found, it was Lader’s book Abortion that was cited favorably eight times in Roe by Justice Harry Blackmun—not any papal encyclical. 39 Thus does the nihilist agenda run deep. How the legal system has been penetrated by these saboteurs will be discussed in a later chapter.
When Lader died in 2006, feminist icon Betty Friedan rightly called him the father of the abortion-rights movement. While his obituary in the New York Times mentioned his battles with the Catholic Church, it said nothing about his unabiding bigotry. 40 To this day, NARAL remains profoundly anti-Catholic, 41 a proud recipient of money from the Playboy Foundation. 42
NARAL’s sister organizations are just as bad. For example, in 1987, the National Organization for Women protested Pope John Paul II’s visit to the United States; demonstrators wore antipapal buttons. Joining in the protest was Eleanor Smeal, who would later head the Feminist Majority. She went one better and arranged to have herself arrested outside the Vatican embassy in Washington. 43 When the pope came to New York City in 1995, he was greeted once again by Catholic-bashing feminists. Sexual libertines of all persuasions showed up, many of them holding obscene posters of the pope and New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor. 44
What unites these champions of unbridled sex is anti-Catholicism. Count the radicals in the gay community among them. None of them has any stomach for any person or institution that counsels restraint, especially Catholicism. The sexual crazies love promiscuity and they don’t want to be told otherwise.
Gay Saboteurs
Radical gays, in general, hate Christianity. They reject the idea that what they are doing is wrong and they cringe when others say their behavior is immoral. This is easily seen in the arts, where gays are disproportionately represented: much of their work constitutes hate speech directed at Christians, especially Catholics.
In many cases, gays were brought up in a Christian household and later rebelled against their religion. It is easy to verify this accusation by simply turning to the Catholic League’s annual reports on anti-Catholicism; there are plenty of examples. Worse, some of the hate mongers are supported by the federal tax code. For example, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of Catholic-bashing gays who dress up as nuns, mock Jesus (every Easter they have a Hunky Jesus contest), and are awarded a tax-exempt status by the United States government for doing so. How is this possible? They give a few dollars to charities every year.
However obnoxious these people are, they are not a menace. The same cannot be said of ACT-UP. “ACT-UP is nihilistic. Completely nihilistic. It wants to destroy the authority of religion, but it has nothing to put in its place. That is the tremendous failure of the gay establishment to me.” 45 These are not the words of a right-wing religious activist: those are the words of Camille Paglia, an iconoclastic lesbian atheist. She does not exaggerate. The following example speaks volumes.
What happened on December 10, 1989, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral was an exhibition of cultural fascism. Hundreds of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) members and supporters showed up to protest the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality, targeting Cardinal O’Connor as the number one villain. Forget about the fact that no private institution in New York gives more money to fight AIDS than the New York Archdiocese—in fact, the Archdiocese opened the first AIDS nursing home in New York City the same year as the ACT-UP explosion 46 —and that no religious body worldwide gives more to help this cause than the Vatican. What matters to these hate-filled homosexuals is that Catholicism is to blame for their own self-inflicted maladies.
The week before the protest began there were posters all over the city that read, “PUBLIC HEALTH MENACE: CARDINAL O’CONNOR.” On the posters were statements like these: “Cardinal O’Connor wants to force women to have children”; “Cardinal O’Connor opposes the teaching of safe sex in order to save lives”; “Cardinal O’Connor condones hatred and violence against lesbians and gays.” It was paid for by ACT-UP and WHAM (Women’s Health Action Mobilization), the groups that organized the demonstration. 47
On the day of the event, dozens of protesters were arrested for blocking traffic by lying prostrate in the street; they were taken away on stretchers for refusing to stand up. Others carried signs: KEEP YOUR CHURCH OUT OF MY CROTCH; KNOW YOUR SCUMBAGS; KEEP YOUR ROSARIES OFF MY OVARIES; CURB YOUR DOGMA, PAPAL BULL, etc. 48 Here is how one reporter put it: “Several slender young men wearing gold-colored robes similar to clerical vestments hoisted a large portrait of a nude Jesus drawn in such a way as to appeal to the prurient interest of homosexual males.” 49 But it was in the cathedral where the most grotesque activities took place.
Dozens made their way into St. Patrick’s Cathedral by flinging condoms in the air, and chaining themselves to pews. They did this while Cardinal O’Connor was attempting to give his homily at the 10:15 Mass; he stopped and led the parishioners in prayer instead. 50 “In all my life,” said Ray Kerrison in the New York Post, “I have never witnessed a spectacle quite like that which shook St. Patrick’s Cathedral yesterday when radical homosexuals turned a celebration of the Holy Eucharist into a screaming babble of sacrilege by standing in the pews, shouting and waving their fists, tossing shredded paper and condoms into the air and forcing squads of cops lining the aisles to arrest them.” 51 The absolute worst moment came when one of the maniacs literally spit a consecrated Host on the floor. An editorial in the New York Times called it “an act of desecration.” 52 It could also be called satanic.
What happened that day was met with
deserved condemnation from Protestants and Jews as well as Catholics. But not everyone objected, and some even got angry at those gays who branded what happened as sacrilegious. 53 Harriet S. Bogard, director of the New York Regional Office of the ADL, showed which side she was on when she attended the Mass. She explained her presence by saying, “I went because I felt it was the right thing to do.” 54 Here she was, a Jewish woman paid to fight bigotry, enjoying Nazi-style tactics against Catholics. She must have been disappointed when Cardinal O’Connor said that future Masses in the Cathedral would be halted “over my dead body.” 55 Rock star Madonna was displeased as well. When asked what she thought about the urban terrorists busting into St. Pat’s, she said, “Sometimes you just have to go in and make a mess of things to get people to pay attention. I think they did the right thing.” 56
Five years later, St. Patrick’s Cathedral would be the site of another gay eruption. It was time for Stonewall 25.
On June 27, 1969, seven New York City policemen raided a small Greenwich Village bar under the suspicion that the club was operating without a liquor license. Inside the Stonewall Bar the cops found boxes of illegal booze and an assortment of drag queens, transsexuals, and other sexual deviants. When the bust started, the transvestites and their homosexual friends attacked the police by trying to burn them alive by throwing lighter fluid and matches on them.