Fr. Shenan J. Boquet: The LGBT Doctrine of Intolerance

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Anti-Trump soccer player Megan Rapinoe in her Twitter feed video endorsing Visa. She will soon be part of an ESPN cover featuring its first same-sex couple. Discretion advised.

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International, July 22, 2019

Normalizing LGBT Ideology

A depressingly true image has been making the rounds on social media. I can’t seem to find the original right now. But if I recall correctly, the text on the image goes something like this: “2009: How will legalizing gay marriage personally affect you? 2019: Celebrate this 11-year-old drag queen, or you’re a bigot!”

That just about sums up the current insanity in our culture.

A decade ago, homosexualist activists were arguing that legalizing same-sex “marriage” was all about “acceptance” and “love,” and that it would have absolutely no impact on the daily life of most ordinary citizens. Opponents of same-sex “marriage” were routinely mocked with statements like: “How is it any of your business what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms?”, or, “If you don’t support gay marriage, don’t get one.” In other words: why get yourself worked up about something that has nothing to do with you?

However, just as pro-family advocates warned at the time, things haven’t turned out that way.

Ever Greater Extremism

There are just too many examples of how same-sex “marriage”, and LGBT ideology in general, have impacted the daily lives of every citizen to cite in a single column. We saw this in a dramatic way throughout June – so-called “pride month.” One could scarcely open a website, or walk down the street, without being confronted by rainbow flags or other overt celebrations of licentious sexual practices. Many schools, libraries, and city and state legislatures flew the flag and held “pride” celebrations, while any effort to question the wisdom of using public buildings in this way was immediately shouted down as “homophobia” and bigotry.

However, this total saturation of the public space with pro-LGBT propaganda is merely one of the milder ways that LGBT extremism has inserted itself into everybody’s lives. Far more troubling is the way that the LGBT movement is propagandizing and recruiting children, often right under the noses of their parents. As a result, many well-meaning parents who decided not to speak out against same-sex “marriage” out of a desire to be more tolerant, are finding that they are losing their very children to belief-systems that they do not, in fact, support.

Disney is one among many companies promoting “pride” with its “Rainbow” collection.

Entertainment companies like Disney are quietly, but more and more insistently, inserting homosexual characters or themes into their shows and movies. Many schools are quietly inserting LGBT teaching into their curriculum, including indoctrinating students in the anti-scientific and profoundly dangerous “transgender” ideology. Predictably, the result has been a dismaying andstratospheric increase in gender dysphoria among school-age children. And then there’s the truly, truly bizarre obsession of the LGBT movement and their “allies” in the media with drag queens – most disturbingly of all, pre-teen drag queens. It’s not just the so-called “drag queen story hours” being held at libraries across the country – an event that, unsurprisingly, convicted sex abusershave been quick to take advantage of. It’s the conscientious recruitment and grooming of children as drag queen performers, and the celebration of these abused children on some of the most-watched television shows in the country.

Meanwhile, drag queen performances – a phenomenon that was once confined to seedy gay bars – is now being mainstreamed as just another form of entertainment for the general masses. Like the explosion of talk shows about transgenderism, this obsession with drag queens seemed to come out of nowhere. Nobody that I know of was clamoring for more drag queens in their lives, or for more “all ages” drag queen shows to which they might take their children. So, who was it who decided that drag queens would be the next big thing, and for what purpose? I don’t know the answer to the first part of that question, but I can hazard a guess as to the second part: it seems to me that exposure to drag queens serves the LGBT ideology as a handy way to further desensitize the public to the sexually bizarre and perverse, including the highly problematic notion of “gender fluidity.”

Intolerance Exposed

In many ways, 2019 has also been the year in which the naked intolerance of the LGBT movement has been exposed. In many cases, however, it has been the LGBT organizations themselves who have exposed their extremism, for the simple reason that they no longer see any reason to hide it. In the past decade they have achieved more than they ever dreamed possible, and they are determined to ride this momentum as far as they possibly can.

Tech giants, well-heeled LGBT organizations, politicians, “philanthropists” and entertainers have openly committed themselves to curtailing, expunging, and vilifying even the mildest expressions of dissent from the LGBT ideology. Among countless recent examples: Facebook just banned a Facebook group for moms opposed to Drag Queen Story Hour. (Amazingly, something that would have been literally unthinkable to most people even just a couple years ago, is now something you cannot speak out against without risking being made a social pariah!). Amazon – where (as one article recently pointed out) you can easily buy Hitler’s Mein Kampf and books celebrating pedophilia – has just removed a number of books designed to help people leave the homosexual lifestyle.

We saw the intolerant spirit of the modern LGBT movement on display after the victory of the U.S. women’s team won the World Cup. The captain of the team, and some other players, are personally homosexual, as well as committed LGBT activists. However, instead of using their victory to unite Americans, we were treated to videos and interviews filled with politically divisive, profanity-laced tirades.

The irony of intolerance: Christian Jaelene Hinkle was told she had no place on her former soccer team after she refused merely to wear a “Pride” jersey.

Ironically, some of the soccer players displayed a breathtaking intolerance towards anyone who disagreed with them, while insistently proclaiming the need for a more “tolerant” country. In the midst of the celebrations, for example, an old interview with a former member of the U.S. women’s team – a Christian – was unearthed. In the interview, Jaelene Hinkle explained her decision to refuse to don a rainbow-themed jersey a couple of years back. “I just felt so convicted in my spirit that it wasn’t my job to wear this jersey,” she said. Even though Hinkle is no longer on the team, current team member Ashlyn Harris immediately shot back with this tweet:

“Hinkle, our team is about inclusion. Your religion was never the problem. The problem is your intolerance and you are homophobic. You don’t belong in a sport that aims to unite and bring people together. You would never fit into our pack or what this team stands for.”

Harris, apparently, was blissfully ignorant of how ironic her tweet was, “i.e.we’re so tolerant and inclusive that you don’t belong here.” The majority of the team want us to believe they are in full support of inclusivity; however, they reject and publicly shame and vilify a teammate who gently disagrees with their position. They define the terms, the language, and application of what is or is not inclusive. If you don’t fit their definition you are banned, ostracized, persecuted, and ridiculed for your views.

Sadly, even within the Church we are seeing signs that LGBT ideologues have grown in brazenness in recent months and years. During “Pride Month” last month, we saw photos of priests openly celebrating so-called “pride masses,” replete with rainbow flags, and homilies full of nudges and winks to the sexual libertinism that the Pride movement so openly celebrates. One priest even celebrated such a Mass on an altar covered with a rainbow altar cloth in the Stonewall Inn, a former gay bar where riots took place in 1969 – an event that many people view as the beginning of the modern day “gay rights” movement. These sacrilegious events typically happen without any repercussions from the Church hierarchy, while bishops and priests who dare to issue even mildly worded warnings about the spiritual dangers of Pride are publicly shamed or even corrected by their superiors.

The Threat of the Equality Act

Of course, this hardly comes as a surprise to the many pro-family advocates who had paid close attention to the LGBT movement. While I don’t doubt that there are some homosexual individuals who simply want to live their lives in peace, the kinds of professional activists who work for LGBT organizations have always had far, far grander, and more pernicious aims. Their basic goal can be summarized like this: to push for total (and, if necessary, enforcedaffirmation of the LGBT sexual identity, and a radical, society-wide sexual revolution.

Courtesy of C-Span coverage

As Franklin Graham recently warned, the next and greatest threat from LGBT extremists is embedded in the deceptively named “Equality Act.” As an article on LifeSite summarizes, the bill, “would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include ‘sex,’ “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity” among expressly recognized “non-discrimination” categories in “public accommodations” (the definition of which would be dramatically expanded); and force employers of 15 or more people to recognize their claimed “gender identity,” forbid them from “discriminating” based on “sexual orientation” or “gender identity,” and mandate transgender “access” to sex-specific facilities.”

This is a radical piece of legislation. As Graham warned, under this law, Christians “would lose all protections to hire people who adhere to their biblical statements of faith. Christians will be persecuted for their sincerely held beliefs as never before. The clear teachings of the Bible on the sins of homosexuality and abortion will no doubt be considered ‘hate speech.’ It will be a nightmare from which this nation may never recover.”

During the battle over same-sex “marriage,” many Christians stayed silent out of a fear of being branded a “hater,” and out of the hope that what LGBT activists promised was true – that same-sex “marriage” wouldn’t affect their lives or those of their children, family, and friends. We no longer have the luxury of believing this to be true. It is time for Christians to wake up and realize the magnitude of the threats against our culture, freedoms, marriage and the family. It is time to see through the cleverly designed rhetoric of the LGBT movement, and to see that beneath the kindly words of “love” and “tolerance” is a ferocious intolerance that will be satisfied with nothing less than enthusiastic endorsement of their worldview. We were fooled once. Let’s not allow ourselves to be fooled twice.