Slander and Anachronisms

The state of California has passed a law mandating LGBT history be taught in the public schools. The law also forbids materials that “contain any matter reflecting adversely” upon LGBT persons. While pushing the LGBT agenda,California law forbids “any sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda.” The new law also warns private schools that the Education Code prohibits ‘discrimination’ in any aspect of the operation of alternative and charter schools.

The revised textbooks will not be available until 2015, but teachers may include material on their own before that. It is therefore essential that those who support the family and true history prepare a careful and correct study guide to answer the misinformation that will be included in the state mandated texts.

For example, many pro-LGBT histories quote John Boswell, author of The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. Boswell, a self-identified ‘gay’ man who died of AIDS at age 47, claimed to have found evidence that in the early Middle Ages the Catholic Church had rituals with sanctioned same-sex “unions,” and these were a kind of marriage. He supported his claim by mistranslating a Greek word found in an ancient document — adelphopoiesis, literally the making of brothers. He ignored the fact that the rite referred to explicitly stated that the union being blessed made two men the equivalent of blood brothers and was a “spiritual” and not a “carnal” one.

Throughout history, a small percentage of people have engaged in sexual intimacy with persons of the same-sex. In most instances, such people did not claim to have a unique identity and in many cases they also engaged in sexual relations with persons of the other sex.

The word ‘homosexual’ was invented in the second half of the 19^th century. In 1886 in his book in his book Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebling used the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual,’ to distinguish between those who were attracted to the same sex and those who were attracted to the other sex. The word ‘gay’ had a primary meaning of carefree, but in the 17^th century it came to mean addicted to pleasures and dissipations. A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer, and a gay house a brothel. In the 1920s the word ‘gay’ became associated with same-sex behavior that disregarded social norms. Applying the label ‘gay’ to an historical figure is in almost every case anachronistic and constitutes slander.

One of the ways LGBT advocates distort history is to claim that all intense same-sex friendships between historical personages included same-sex intimacy, when in fact there is no evidence for this.

Each distortion of history needs to be corrected. It is particularly important that material which maligns religion be challenged. If “sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda” in schools is forbidden byCalifornialaw, anti-religious propaganda should also be. Parents must educate themselves in these areas. They need to be armed with the truth so that they can protect their children.