Tonight, the 23rd of May, Voces Clamantium, a campus Christian group, will sponsor a presentation by Yvette Cantu Schneider, an outspoken condemner of homosexuals and lesbians, and a policy analyst for the Family Research Council (FRC) in Washington DC. A rather less organized group of people will protest Mrs. Schneider's appearance at 5 p.m. For those who wonder what all the fuss is about, here are some of the things Yvette Cantu Schneider and her superiors at the FRC in Washington, have said about gay men and lesbians:
In an interview conducted by one of her co-workers at the Family Research Council, and published in Lambda Report ONLINE, the then-Miss Cantu alleged that lesbians actively recruit women who are emotionally fragile or unhappily married, so that lesbianism is effectively "a dysfunctional club." "Lesbianism," she said, "is fraught with emotional dependencies. The idolatry, the combustible relationships where you know it's going to blow at any time, because there are just too many emotions in there. What people commonly call 'dysfunction' is everywhere in the lesbian community."
She alleges that "People are being sucked in and sacrificed on the altar of tolerance." In other words if communities tolerate homosexuals and lesbians, they will recruit more followers. She says people who are desperate for love and acceptance "don't have to eat the stale crumbs off the dirty floor, which is basically what lesbianism is."
Gay men, she claims, are "trapped" into thinking that being gay is "normal" and "acceptable," and this leads to contracting AIDS. She says she was "trapped" in this mindset once, too: "Even when I was living with two men dying of AIDS, it didn't occur to me that it was their gayness that had caused this to happen to them." To gay men she says, "You know your behavior is causing this [AIDS]. You know. We all know. Everyone knows."
Miss Cantu refers to AIDS as God's "supernatural intervention" intended to make men and women "leave the homosexual lifestyle," "an unnatural identity based on selfish and sinful conduct."
Gay men, says Cantu, sometimes pretend to be interested in raising children and having families, but that, she alleges, is just a public relations pretense: "To me, thinking that a gay couple would even want to adopt a child is bizarre [because] I can't imagine them wanting that kind of responsibility. The homosexuals I knew who had been married before had already dumped their kids on their ex-wives, and were perfectly happy to see them two weeks out of the year! If they had children, what would happen when they were too busy having their sex parties?"
On October 16, 1998, the day of Matthew Shepard's funeral (Shepard was kidnapped, mortally beaten and left to die by people who hate homosexuals), the Family Research Council, Mrs. Schneider's employer, issued this statement: "In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, homosexuals are included in a list of sinners, who, if unrepentant, will not inherit the kingdom of God" (www.frc.org/press/101698.html). In other words, Matthew Shepard, if unrepentant when he was murdered, went to hell.
The FRC also has spread the following vicious (and utterly unsupported) lies: "Gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement." "They constitute about a third of child molesters" (www.frc.org/misc/bl057.pdf).
Mrs. Schneider's immediate supervisor at the FRC, Robert Knight, says: "I know a guy who has just entered jail, tragically, because he grew up in a lesbian household. He eventually became a voyeur, and he is in on a peeping Tom charge. He was so curious about how normal people have sex." "Homosexuals do not do what mom and dad do in the bedroom. They don't provide children the role models that mom and dad do" ("Same-sex Marriage?" www.frc.org/net/st96d2.html).
Finally, the FRC's published position on homosexuals and religion: "The activist homosexual agenda and worldview are fundamentally incompatible with Christianity or any form of true religion, because homosexuality is ultimately narcissism" (Steven A. Schwalm, "Desecrating Corpus Christi: The Assault on Christians by the Militant Homosexual Movement" www.frc.org/podium/pd98j2hs.html).
Do these kinds of statements promote open debate and free, informed discussion of an important social issue, or do they promote ignorance, fear, hatred and condemnation? That is what all the fuss is about.
