The term "Gay Mafia," as it has come to be used by arts and entertainment insiders, does not fully or accurately capture the influence (or methodology) of gay activism on current political debate. The extreme harassment exerted by the gay lobby in certain parts of this country is more like the violently persuasive peer pressure and economic coercion employed by the old White Citizen's Councils of the Deep South during the post-Brown years.

However, our common usage of Mafia, thanks to Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, connotes a more fiendishly implicit brand of influence. "We will make him an offer he can't refuse." "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes." The Corleones are deadly, but they have style, and they are charmingly indirect, and they are polite (as they shoot you in the back of your head).

But the Gay Mafia is not subtle. The Gay Mafia is screechingly "in your face." "Gay McCarthyism" or "Gay Fascism" strikes me as an even more accurate label. Like the McCarthyites of old, too many gay activists are not so worried about the facts. Just turn up the volume and start screaming accusations.

This exchange between Ray Suarez and Harry Knox (an official from the Human Rights Campaign) on last night's Newshour on PBS with(out) Jim Lehrer, discussing the announcement that Rick Warren will deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration, is emblematic:

HARRY KNOX: [W]e were profoundly disappointed in the president-elect's pick because he chose someone who is a divisive person, who has attacked our community and attacked our families, families like mine, and called us every horrible thing he can think of.

And that's the person that the president-elect has chosen to represent all of religious thought in America on this most important symbolic day, this very first day of his administration.

For us, it was a real slap in the face that the person who associated people like me and my partner, Mike, my husband, Mike, with bestiality and polygamy and pedophilia, of all things, would be the person that the president-elect would choose.


Say what? Are we talking about the same Rick Warren? Soft and fuzzy, "purpose-driven," compassionate evangelical Rick Warren?

More Harry: This is a person who has fundamentally disrespected people like me on every occasion that he had opportunity. He has, in fact, leveraged homophobia to get ahead in his career. And this is like putting an anti-Semite at the first part of the program and then saying, "Well, we're going to add a rabbi at the end. Won't all the Jews be happy?"

This is the worst possible choice the president-elect could have made. This is a divisive choice, not one that brings America together.


Either you are with us, or you are a Nazi. What bothers me most about the debate over "gay rights" these days is the "intolerance." Too many front-persons for the gay agenda behave like Harry Knox.

There was a time when I was inclined to support gay rights, certainly civil unions, and, at times, even the possibility of gay marriage. I am much less sympathetic to the cause these days. Why? My hunch is that the marriage debate is merely a means to a more significant end. I worry that the Gay Civil Rights Movement is intent on settling for nothing less than total equality, enforced by federal "civil rights" legislation directed at rooting out "discriminators" and "homophobes," wherever they may be.

I am happy to have a public conversation in which "reasonable people can disagree without being disagreeable," to quote the President-elect, but these guys are looking to steamroll the debate by stridently shouting down any dissenting opinion.

I am growing more and more frustrated with the not so "velvet" intimidation.

NOTE on Recent Influences: many thanks to the recent piece by Francis Beckwith in First Things, which helped me to coalesce my thoughts on this matter.