Many Americans were shocked to hear the report by Todd Starnes that “a family-owned Christian bakery, under investigation for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple, has been forced to close its doors after a vicious boycott by militant homosexual activists.”
But why should we be surprised? Bullying and intimidation have been standard operating procedures for many gay activists for more than 60 years. Why should they change their approach now?
In the early 1970s, gay activists became famous for their “zaps,” which were strategically timed, carefully staged hit-and-run protests meant to humiliate and intimidate their opponents. According to gay historian David Eisenbach, zaps were used successfully by gay activists to push TV executives to portray homosexuality sympathetically and positively: “TV executives discovered they could avoid zaps and bad publicity by having gay activists review scripts that dealt with homosexuality before they were aired.”
In other words, “Write the scripts the way we like it, or incur our wrath.”
Zaps were also used to disrupt meetings of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in protest of the its classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder. The Rainbow History Project, which celebrates gay pressure tactics, posted a report entitled “Zapping the Shrinks” (originally published May 3, 1971), boasting about the “disruption by gay activists at the [APA’s] 1970 convention in San Francisco.”
At this convention, activists carried out a special “zap” during a high point of the conference. The activists burst into the conference hall and pushed their way past a number of elderly psychiatrists who tried to stop them. And there was no mistaking who the intruders were. The report says, “Half of the men were in really fabulous drag with wildly painted faces, that accentuated the spontaneous, liberating attitude of brothers in drag.”
This is some of the background leading up to the APA’s momentous decision to depathologize homosexuality in 1973, which means this was hardly a matter of dispassionate scientific debate—as even the gay activist scientist Simon LeVay noted in his book Queer Science: “Gay activism was clearly the force that propelled the APA to declassify homosexuality.”
In 2000, when the popular radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger was going to launch a TV show, there was a concerted gay effort to keep her off the airwaves because of her so-called homophobic comments.
As stated on the StopDrLaura.com website, “The year-long campaign against Dr. Laura—coordinated via this Web site and all done on an $18,000 budget, most of it raised from the online sale of T-shirts—so exposed Dr. Laura’s anti-gay rhetoric to the world, that she could not even sneeze without the major national media, and thousands of individual activists like yourselves, watching, recording her every word, and pouncing when action was needed. As a result of the 50+ million hits this pro bono site received in just 10 months, and the 300,000 visitors per month that we continued to get throughout the campaign, protests were organized in 34 cities across the country and Canada, over 170 advertisers dropped Dr. Laura’s TV show (including some 70 or so advertisers that Canadian activists got to drop her in that country alone!), and over 30 advertisers dropped her radio show, reportedly costing her over $30 million in advertising.”
So much for tolerance and diversity.
Even in academic circles, professors and researchers are afraid to get out of step with gay activist forces. As noted by Dr. Nicholas Cummings, a self-described lifelong liberal and a former president of the APA, “As one who lived through the era of McCarthyism, as egregious as that was, it was not as bad as the unspoken intimidation that exists today. In the 1950s, I knew the enemies that would restrict my freedom: the John Birch Society, the KKK, the American Nazi Party, Stalinists, the evangelists in the revival tent down the street. Now the intimidator is more likely to be my colleague in practice, my fellow faculty member and my own APA.”
It is with good reason that I have said repeatedly that the unspoken gay activist mantra is “We will intimidate and we will manipulate until you capitulate.”
Now Aaron Klein, co-owner with his wife, Melissa, of the Oregon bakery Sweet Cakes by Melissa, has stated, “The LGBT attacks are the reason we are shutting down the shop. They have killed our business through mob tactics.”
According to Klein, “The LGBT protestors … turned on other wedding vendors around the community. They threatened to boycott any florists, wedding planners or other vendors that did business with Sweet Cakes by Melissa. That tipped the scales. The LGBT activists inundated them with phone calls and threatened them. They would tell our vendors, ‘If you don’t stop doing business with Sweet Cakes by Melissa, we will shut you down.’”
Already in March, Klein noted that his attorney called this “economic terrorism,” explaining, “These people, they have literally tried to cut any business ties off through harassment.”
Sadly, gay intimidation tactics have triumphed again, meaning we can expect to see more of this in the coming days, especially as gay activists are joined by their straight allies, including government officials, big businesses, universities and the media.
Simply stated, if you operate your business and conduct your life based on biblical values, prepare to be treated as a law-breaking bigot. The only question is, How will you respond?
(For documentation of quotes in this article, see A Queer Thing Happened to America.)
Michael Brown is author of The Real Kosher Jesus and host of the nationally syndicated talk radio show The Line of Fire on the Salem Radio Network. He is also president of FIRE School of Ministry and director of the Coalition of Conscience. Follow him at AskDrBrown on Facebook or @drmichaellbrown on Twitter.
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