Below is an interesting editorial on the march of gay rights, how it got started, and how it's radical members seek to make changes in Society. The "story" has been omitted from this post due to length of article.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46887
THE MARKETING OF EVIL
How 'gay rights' is being sold
to America
Exposed: Powerful manipulation techniques behind radical homosexual agenda
Posted: October 18, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Editor's note: Following is the highly acclaimed – and to many, shocking – first chapter of WND Managing Editor David Kupelian's blockbuster book, "The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom." In it, Kupelian rips the veil off the previously hidden marketing strategies and powerful propaganda techniques used with such stunning success to "sell" Americans on homosexuality and the radical "gay rights" agenda over the last few years – a marketing juggernaut that continues to accelerate daily.
SPECIAL OFFER: For a limited time, get "The Marketing of Evil," widely praised as the "must-read" book of the year, autographed and personalized at no extra charge. See details at end.
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
In today's polarized climate, however, it seems most of us either condemn homosexuals as evil corrupters of society or we fawn over them as noble victims and cultural heroes. We either accuse them of "choosing" to be "wicked sexual deviants," or we claim – utterly without evidence – that "gayness" is an inborn, genetic trait.
Reality, however, lies somewhere else. Deep down, people of conscience know homosexuality is neither an innocent, inborn "minority" characteristic like skin color, nor a conscious choice to become evil and to corrupt others. But without understanding what we're really dealing with, we're not only powerless to help others but easily confused and corrupted ourselves.
Today, thanks to America's politically correct "gay-friendly" culture, millions of human beings in the grip of this same unnatural sexual compulsion find it much easier to accept – even to wear as a badge of honor.
But they still don't understand it. In fact, they have less desire than ever to understand it – just as the larger society has also lost interest in understanding homosexuality. But sometimes not knowing what you're dealing with can be dangerous. So let's take off the rainbow-colored glasses and objectively explore this phenomenon we call "gay rights."
It grew out of the "sexual liberation" movement of the 1960s. To be precise, the June 11, 1969, "Stonewall riot" – when a group of homosexuals at New York City's Stonewall Inn resisted police commands to disperse – is widely regarded as the birth of the "gay liberation" movement.
This emerging political force made considerable strides during the '70s, most notably in persuading – many say intimidating – the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 into removing homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders. But "gay rights" was young, inexperienced, underfunded, and understaffed as political movements go, and the issue received little support from politicians or the nation in general.
"Equality for gays" was not yet a phrase that reverberated in the hearts and minds of Americans. Then came AIDS.
The problem of the plague
Surely, many activists thought, this would be their movement's death knell. For while they were trying to convince the mainstream that homosexuals represented a normal, healthy, alternative lifestyle, along comes a modern plague – horrible, incurable, fatal, and spread primarily by promiscuous homosexual men.
AIDS – originally named GRID (gay-related immunodeficiency disease) until activist homosexuals pressured the medical establishment to switch to the generic acronym AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) – was the ultimate public relations nightmare. It gave society a brand-new reason to fear and shun homosexuals – namely, concern over becoming infected with a nightmarish new disease.
And AIDS did something else. In order for the medical establishment and news media to communicate to the public how the disease was being transmitted, it became necessary to focus publicly on the one thing homosexuals most wanted to downplay – the sometimes-bizarre sexual acts in which they engage and their often astronomically high numbers of sexual partners. (A widely cited 1978 study by Alan P. Bell and Martin S. Wineburg reported that 43 percent of homosexuals had more than five hundred sex partners during their lifetime.)
In addition, the "silver bullet" medical cure Americans had virtually come to expect, having grown up in the age of miracle drugs like the polio vaccine and penicillin, never materialized. Rather, AIDS experts and public health authorities issued dire warnings about a disease reminiscent of the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages:
By the early years of the next century, we could have lost between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. There’s no question about that. –Surgeon General C. Everett KoopNinety percent of the people infected [with HIV] don’t even know it. – Dr. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the HIV virus
In many areas, the number of persons affected with the AIDS virus is at least 100 times greater than reported case of AIDS. – Dr. James Curran, director of AIDS and HIV immunology and prevention activities at the Centers for Disease Control
Meanwhile, throughout the '80s and beyond, as AIDS infection and death rates skyrocketed with each passing year, high-profile figures were dying of the disease, including actor Rock Hudson in 1985, ABC News anchor Max Robinson in 1988, and ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev in 1993.
During this time the public experienced two distinct and widespread reactions to the unfolding AIDS epidemic. One was the natural sympathy evoked by witnessing the terrible suffering and death of AIDS victims.
But the other, if less politically correct, was fear and loathing of homosexuals. After all, there was no way back in those early days of the disease to rule out AIDS transmission via "casual contact" – that is, by means other than sex and intravenous drug use. As prominent Harvard AIDS researcher Dr. William Haseltine warned at the time: "Anyone who tells you categorically that AIDS is not contracted by saliva is not telling you the truth. AIDS may, in fact, be transmissible by tears, saliva, bodily fluids and mosquito bites."
Fears that AIDS would "break out" into the general population were further fanned by horror stories such as that of Kimberly Bergalis, a Florida girl who contracted AIDS (along with several other patients) from her homosexual dentist, David Acer.
As a matter of fact, many Americans not part of the two main "at-risk groups" (male homosexuals and IV drug abusers) were dying, mostly from HIV-tainted blood transfusions. One of them, Ryan White, an eighteen-year-old Indiana boy with hemophilia who became infected with HIV through a blood transfusion, died of AIDS in 1990 and became the poster boy for rallying Americans to support AIDS research. Two years later tennis great Arthur Ashe, also infected by an HIV-tainted transfusion, succumbed to the disease.
As a public relations matter, AIDS was daunting. This modern plague, if not handled brilliantly in the court of public opinion, could result in homosexuals being widely shunned. On the other hand, perhaps the sympathy factor could be harnessed and multiplied to advance the activists' cause. The movement definitely needed help.
The defiant, storm-trooper tactics of in-your-face groups like ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) may or may not have been successful in pressuring the federal government to increase its commitment to combating AIDS. But such tactics definitely were successful in giving activist homosexuals a very bad name.
One infamous incident was the assault on New York’s famed St. Patrick's Cathedral on December 10, 1989. While Cardinal John O'Connor presided over the 10:15 Sunday morning Mass, a multitude of "pro-choice" and "gay rights" activists protested angrily outside. Some, wearing gold-colored robes similar to clerical vestments, hoisted a large portrait of a pornographically altered frontal nude portrait of Jesus.
"You bigot, O'Connor, you're killing us!" screamed one protester, while signs called the archbishop "Murderer!"
Then it got really ugly. Scores of protesters entered the church, resulting in what many in the packed house of parishioners described as a "nightmare."
"The 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 condoms into the air," recounted the New York Post. One of the invaders grabbed a consecrated wafer and threw it to the ground.
Outside, demonstrators, many of them members of ACT-UP, carried placards that summed up their sentiments toward the Catholic Church: "Keep your church out of my crotch." "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries." "Eternal life to Cardinal John O'Connor NOW!" "Curb your dogma."
Clearly, the young movement was flirting with oblivion if it persisted in such ugly, indefensible tactics. It needed a new, more civilized direction if it ever hoped to convince Americans that homosexuality was a perfectly normal alternative lifestyle.
This new direction would somehow have to convert the fearsome AIDS epidemic from a negative into a positive. What was needed was a comprehensive, long-term public relations campaign that had to be brilliantly conceived and skillfully executed.
War conference
In February 1988, some 175 leading activists representing homosexual groups from across the nation held a war conference in Warrenton, Virginia, to map out their movement’s future. Shortly thereafter, activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen put into book form the comprehensive public relations plan they had been advocating with their gay-rights peers for several years.
Kirk and Madsen were not the kind of drooling activists that would burst into churches and throw condoms in the air. They were smart guys – very smart. Kirk, a Harvard-educated researcher in neuropsychiatry, worked with the Johns Hopkins Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth and designed aptitude tests for adults with 200+ IQs. Madsen, with a doctorate in politics from Harvard, was an expert on public persuasion tactics and social marketing. Together they wrote "After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90s."
"As cynical as it may seem," they explained at the outset, "AIDS gives us a chance, however brief, to establish ourselves as a victimized minority legitimately deserving of America's special protection and care. At the same time," they warned, "it generates mass hysteria of precisely the sort that has brought about public stonings and leper colonies since the Dark Ages and before. … How can we maximize the sympathy and minimize the fear? How, given the horrid hand that AIDS has dealt us, can we best play it?"
The bottom line of Kirk and Madsen's master plan? "The campaign we outline in this book, though complex, depends centrally upon a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising."
Arguing that, skillfully handled, the AIDS epidemic could conquer American resistance to homosexuality and form the basis of a comprehensive, long-term marketing campaign to sell "gay rights" to straight America, "After the Ball" became the public-relations "bible" of the movement.
Kirk and Madsen's "war goal," explains marketing expert Paul E. Rondeau of Regent University, was to "force acceptance of homosexual culture into the mainstream, to silence opposition, and ultimately to convert American society." In his comprehensive study, "Selling Homosexuality to America," Rondeau writes:
The extensive three-stage strategy to Desensitize, Jam and Convert the American public is reminiscent of George Orwell’s premise of goodthink and badthink in "1984." As Kirk and Madsen put it, "To one extent or another, the separability – and manipulability – of the verbal label is the basis for all the abstract principles underlying our proposed campaign."
Separability? Manipulability? Allow me to translate this psychological marketing jargon: We can change what people actually think and feel by breaking their current negative associations with our cause and replacing them with positive associations.
Simple case in point: homosexual activists call their movement "gay rights." This accomplishes two major objectives: (1) Use of the word gay rather than homosexual masks the controversial sexual behavior involved and accentuates instead a vague but positive-sounding cultural identity – gay, which, after all, once meant "happy"; and (2) describing their battle from the get-go as one over "rights" implies homosexuals are being denied the basic freedoms of citizenship that others enjoy.
So merely by using the term gay rights, and persuading politicians and the media to adopt this terminology, activists seeking to transform America have framed the terms of the debate in their favor almost before the contest begins. (And in public relations warfare, he who frames the terms of the debate almost always wins. The abortion rights movement has prevailed in that war precisely because it succeeded, early on, in framing the debate as a question, not of abortion, but of choice. The abortion vanguard correctly anticipated that it would be far easier to defend an abstract, positive-sounding idea like choice than the unrestricted slaughter of unborn babies.)
Okay, you might be wondering, even granting the movement's cutting-edge marketing savvy, how do you sell middle America on those five hundred sex partners and weird sexual practices? Answer, according to Kirk and Madsen, you don't. Just don't talk about it. Rather, look and act as normal as possible for the camera.
"When you're very different, and people hate you for it," they explain, "this is what you do: first you get your foot in the door, by being as similar as possible; then, and only then – when your one little difference is finally accepted – can you start dragging in your other peculiarities, one by one. You hammer in the wedge narrow end first. As the saying goes, allow the camel's nose beneath your tent, and his whole body will soon follow."
In other words, sadomasochists, leather fetishists, cross-dressers, transgenders, and other "peculiar" members of the homosexual community need to keep away from the tent and out of sight while the sales job is under way. Later, once the camel is safely inside, there will be room for all.
Rondeau explains Kirk and Madsen's techniques of "desensitization," "jamming," and "conversion" this way:
Desensitization is described as inundating the public in a "continuous flood of gay-related advertising, presented in the least offensive fashion possible. If straights can't shut off the shower, they may at least eventually get used to being wet." But, the activists did not mean advertising in the usual marketing context but, rather, quite a different approach: "The main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome." They add, "[S]eek desensitization and nothing more. … If you can get [straights] to think [homosexuality] is just another thing – meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders – then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won."This planned hegemony is a variant of the type that Michael Warren describes in "Seeing Through the Media" where it "is not raw overt coercion; it is one group's covert orchestration of compliance by another group through structuring the consciousness of the second group."
"Structuring the consciousness" of others? If that phraseology is uncomfortably reminiscent of various mind control and brainwashing tales you might have heard over the years, don’t be surprised. Manipulating the emotions and thereby restructuring the thoughts and beliefs of large numbers of people is what modern marketing is all about.
"Jamming," explains Rondeau, "is psychological terrorism meant to silence expression of or even support for dissenting opinion." Radio counselor and psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger experienced big-time jamming during the run-up to her planned television show. Outraged over a single comment critical of homosexuals she had made on her radio program, activists launched a massive intimidation campaign against the television program's advertisers. As a result, the new show was stillborn.