Mr. Romney:
As a scholar of the Holocaust, and together with all decent human beings, I demand that you reflect on the deeper meanings of your having signed the malicious pledge handed to you by the gang of bigots of the so-called “National Organization for Marriage.”
Whereas you might have signed the NOM pledge as a political expediency to remain competitive with primary candidates even more inclined than you are to poisonous scapegoating of a minority, your signature on that document is not worthy of one who aspires to be a world leader in an age when the mayors of Paris and Berlin, and the prime ministers of Belgium and Iceland — very successful in their leadership roles — happen to belong to sexual minorities.
NOM’s anti-LGBT fear-mongering very often includes scare-stories about school children being taught that sexual minorities exist. Intersex people — about whom there can be no doubt whatsoever as to whether they are “born that way” — are born every day; there is no reason why they can not lead fulfilling lives, and to mock and to deride them, to be wilfully cruel against them, is shameful, and, again, something not worthy of one who aspires to be a world leader. Where NOM’s head bigots are demanding a gag order against ever teaching that — for example — the great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote love poems to a man — they are marking themselves as malicious bullies seeking to have ignorance prevail over enlightenment, at the expense of flesh-and-blood human beings. The recent horrifying specter of a video widely circulated on the internet showing a four or five-year-old boy in a church-like setting singing “Ain’t no homos gonna make it to heaven,” with the adults who so hatefully brainwashed him laughing and applauding, confirms that bigotry against sexual minorities is a social cancer, one that you should be ashamed of yourself for helping to metastasize. NOM’s Jennifer Roback Morse is a party to the infantile theocratic demonization of sexual minorities wherein they are alleged to be the devil’s work, a fraudulent allegation that only recently had been made by Boston bishop’s aid Daniel Avila, who was forced to resign in disgrace because he made it. In North Carolina, Pastor Sean Harris gave his followers “special dispensation” to break the bones of suspected sexual minority children, as if the 3-year-old Floridian Ronnie Paris, Jr. had not been beaten to death because his father thought he seemed gay.
Portraying a targeted minority as being sub-human — the better to be able to abuse them without conscience pangs — is a classic bigot strategy. African-Americans long were demeaned according to that game plan, with many of the whites who oppressed them believing they had a God-given right to do so; your Church of Latter Day Saints has little proud history on that score, as you well know. William C. Duncan, a Board member of NOM’s Ruth Institute, participated in an all-day anti-sexual minorities symposium at Liberty University, where his session topic was “Homosexuals or Homo sapiens; Who Deserves Protected Class Status?” Your signature is on that organization’s pledge, and you told the Liberty University community that you share their values. When you fail to stand up against bigot monsters, when you fail to tell them that their bigotry is wrong in an absolute sense, you are complicit in their bigotry, and you are telling the world a lot more about yourself than you are about the human beings whose humanity you bigots are so aggressively denying.
NOM and its associated merchants of hate are responsible for incitements to discrimination and to violence that have no justifiable place in our civilization. NOM-approved speakers have told bigot rallies that homosexuals are “worthy to death.” Kansas pastor Curtis Knapp says of sexual minorities “They should be put to death” and that the government should do the killing. NOM’s Maggie Gallagher got Wallbuilder’s David Barton so riled up during a radio broadcast that he said that the bloody scalps of New York State Republican legislators who voted for equality should be hung over the railing as a warning to others. Gallagher herself, describing her ambitions to hate-monger against sexual minorities and to repeal their rights where their rights have advanced, said “It’s gonna be a bloody mess in New York.” Your signature on NOM’s pledge emboldens NOM and similar bigots to issue these threats of domestic terror against sexual minority Americans and the heterosexual family members, friends and associates who affirm their humanity and support their rights. Recently, Pastor Dennis Leatherman of Maryland said that his “flesh kind of likes the idea” of killing all homosexuals. Another scandalously uninhibited and unrepentant bigot pastor, Charles Worley of North Carolina, proposes herding sexual minorities into concentration camps. The disgrace of Japanese-American internment during World War II was officially acknowledged in 1988 when President Ronald Reagan signed legislation apologizing to the victims. Just as all Japanese-Americans were, at that time, wrongfully, being looked at as enemies, their human and civil rights violated, NOM’s malevolent propaganda against sexual minorities portrays us all as enemies of the nation. Without a shred of evidence, NOM’s leaders defame sexual minorities by alleging that if sexual minorities have equality, civilization will collapse. Yet, just as out gay and lesbian military personnel today successfully contribute to the defense of the United States, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team comprised of Japanese-American soldiers took part in the liberation of Rome.
Mussolini officially stated that Italy had no sexual minorities, but on the other hand he worked tirelessly to keep sexual, and other, minorities oppressed. He had a power-sharing agreement with the Vatican, to which he gave independent nation status, while mandating daily lessons in Catholicism in Italian schools. Many Italian Jews, and Italian sexual minorities were deported to far-flung concentration camps, though there was a concentration camp near Trieste. Today at that site, a memorial stands to the sexual minority victims of the Holocaust. Have the lessons of the Holocaust been learned? As an aspiring world leader, you should be interested in both the answer to the question, and in your part in answering it. Mussolini’s grand-daughter Alessandra Mussolini has said that it is “better to be a fascist than a faggot.”
Denying the humanity of arrogantly detested minorities was the root cause and main propeller of the Holocaust. To escape from torture, some sexual minority concentration camp prisoners flung themselves at the concentration camps’ electrified perimeter fences. Today in the United States, still, sexual minority students in many school districts are subjected to daily barrages of malignant demonization — in which NOM specializes — and criminal harassment and assault; some escape the torture by killing themselves. As somebody who organized a preparatory school, gang-style attack against a student who was different, you are now at a fork in the road where you must decide whether you aspire to be President of the United States, or the Bigot-in-Chief.
Driving wedges between minorities, and fanning hostility against sexual minorities is written into NOM’s strategy documents, but is far from being a sine qua non of Republican political identity. Notably, President Gerald Ford and Vice-President Dick Cheney have supported equality. Gary Johnson, a one-time Republican governor of New Mexico, sees the humanity of sexual minorities and supports their equality. Lincoln Chaffee and Dan Evans, respectively former Republican U.S. Senators for Rhode Island and Washington State, see the humanity of sexual minorities and support their equality. The most senior Republican woman in the U.S. House, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, respects the humanity in sexual minorities and supports their equality.
The honorable actions for you now to take would be those of revoking your signature on the pledge from the despicable gang of NOM bigots, and of stating unequivocally that you will not include the scapegoating of sexual minorities in your platform. Whether the actions you now take will be honorable remains to be seen.
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