Here is my Gay Agenda

Christopher Gregory/Getty Images

“The Gay Agenda”. Come on, we’ve all heard it said. In particular it is the very large (and consequently very dangerous) organisations, like my old favourite the Concerned Women for America. They love using the term – it is their staple phrase. They use it almost every time they want to bring up our particular minority. “The Gay Agenda”. Really terrifying, right? There is an agenda. We have an agenda. I, personally, as an eighteen-year-old British panromantic, have an agenda. According to the American Conservatives.

One problem I’ve always had with personally having a gay agenda (because if the homophobes say it, it must be true, right?) is that I don’t actually know what the gay agenda is. I actually wrote to a few people from the CWfA organisation and asked them what they thought the gay agenda was. They were very cagey about the subject by which I mean they ignored my emails so that anecdote was amazingly redundant. Hey, I tried.

So I got onto the Internet and, what do you know, there’s a lot of websites that use the phrase, but very few that actually explain it in quantifiable terms. It just looks like everyone is terrified of something they don’t understand, but then that is how prejudice works.

According to Wikipedia, the Gay Agenda “is applied to efforts to change government policies and laws on LGBT issues (e.g., same-sex marriage, LGBT adoption, recognizing sexual orientation as a civil rights minority classification, LGBT military participation, inclusion of LGBT history and themes in public education), as well as non-governmental campaigns and individual actions that increase visibility and cultural acceptance of LGBT people, relationships, and identities.”

Oh. Is that the Gay Agenda? It’s hardly the horrific scenario that you think of, right? I mean, wanting to have equal civil rights? The right to gay marriage (also known as marriage because, you know, I wrote this  blog. I didn't gay-write it). Adoption - these are not things that sane individuals baulk at.

It gets weirder – the Alliance Defense Fund says that the “Gay Agenda” is to:

1. Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible
2. Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers
3. Give homosexual protectors a just cause
4. Make gays look good
5. Make the victimizers look bad
6. Get funds from corporate America

According to the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Agenda is discussed in After the Ball, a book in which “the two men (Kirk and Madsen) proposed using tactics on 'straight' America that are remarkably similar to the brainwashing methods of Mao Tse-Tung's Communist Chinese – mixed with Madison Avenue's most persuasive selling techniques.”

Notice anything connecting the two descriptions, aside from the obvious? They are both statements from American conservative organisations. You know what Americans (in a more I-watch-a-bit-of-Fox-and-laugh-at-the-bias generalised way) are afraid of? It would be people taking money from the state, and Communism. There is no quicker way to get the extreme right wing and uneducated of America on your side than to invoke the C word. They just tried to connect LGBT to Communism. Funnily enough, that’s not a leap that sane people tend to make.

You want to know my personal favourite one? Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn said that the "gay agenda" was a more pressing danger than any terrorist activity affecting Americans. That was in 2004. We’re not talking 1990s terrorism, when it was considered uncommon. This is only three years after 9/11. This man essentially said that me wanting to have anything other than straight couples discussed in sex education is worse than someone murdering thousands. That is how worried they are of anything LGBT.

America worries me, not least because all of the Republican candidates want to remove most of the rights that LGBT Americans are entitled to. What is most irritating is that they are still considered viable candidates. I still don’t understand why.

Take one example – Rick Santorum. Yup, you must know him. There is a fantastic quote going around, which some bright spark attached to a suitably smug picture, here: 

This picture was a satirical spoof, made out to look like something he would say. But everyone thinks it was real, because it doesn't sound like something he wouldn't say.

We are talking about a man who can legitimately draw a straight line between homosexuality, paedophilia and bestiality, and not look at himself like a complete lunatic. This is a man who thinks that birth control is a sin. This is a man who thinks that legalising gay marriage would lead to legalising marriages between any amount of people. If he had any form of logic, he would look at the multitude of countries that have gay marriage already and see that, funnily enough, they haven't begun marrying men to dogs.

Unfortunately, we can't reason with any of the Republican candidates because they seem to be having a let's-see-how-close-to-fascist-we-can-get-before-even-the-majority-that-we-"benefit"-begin-to-call-us-out-on-it competition. They're doing pretty well at is so far, but careful Santorum! You're getting so right wing, even the right wing have stopped voting for you.

So this post is like my agenda. That terrifying Gay Agenda that sends shivers down the spines of anyone who doesn't quite understand. Here's my big secret. I'll whisper it to you now:  

There is no gay agenda.