Onward, Christian soldiers
The real agenda of the same-sex marriage opponents, in their own words.

By A.C. Thompson

IF YOU'RE LOOKING for a creepy read, pick up a copy of The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today. –Written by Alan Sears and Craig Osten, two of the main movers behind the efforts to stop same-sex marriage, the 229-page tome is a blueprint for stomping on the rights of gays and lesbians.

Students of the Reagan-era culture wars may be familiar with Sears's name: he was a federal prosecutor on several high-profile obscenity cases and the head of then-attorney general Ed Meese's controversial Commission on Pornography.

These days Sears is president, CEO, and general counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, the hyper-conservative Christian litigation center spearheading the legal assault on same-sex marriage. Here in San Francisco, the fund is paying at least four lawyers to sue the city for issuing marriage licenses to non-hetero couples.

In court the fund's lawyers cloak their arguments in generic, generally inoffensive legal jargon – their opening briefs, for example, accuse city officials of "extreme and blatant disregard for California law."

But The Homosexual Agenda lays out exactly where Sears and company are really coming from and makes it clear the fund and their friends on the Christian right are trying to do far more than preserve marriage as the province of a man and a woman.

The true goal is to keep the states and federal government from totally outlawing discrimination against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people – and any other "extreme" and "disordered" people deemed evil by religious scriptures. Should same-sex marriages – or even civil unions – gain widespread legal acceptance, it would mark another major step toward barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.

"To put it plainly," Sears and Osten write in The Homosexual Agenda, "there is either a lawful basis to differentiate ('discriminate') between persons based on sex/gender and/or their forms of sexual behavior or there is not."

The ability to discriminate – without running afoul of state or federal laws – is threatened, according to Sears and Osten, by the "advance of the homosexual legal agenda."

In the view of Chip Berlet, a Massachusetts-based researcher who's been tracking the far right for more than 20 years, "policing gender is the central bugaboo of the Christian right. It's always been gender." Berlet is a senior analyst with Political Research Associates, a think tank that monitors conservative movements and the extreme right.

Though Sears and Osten make sure to roll out the love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin line in The Homosexual Agenda, the book is fairly dripping with venom. Queer activists are repeatedly cast as Hitler-lovers and quasi-Nazis, while evangelical ideologues are portrayed as noble foes of creeping fascism. In one amazingly tasteless passage, Sears and Osten even liken themselves to German pastor Martin Niemoeller, who was sent to a concentration camp by Hitler for speaking out against the Third Reich.

The writers go on to claim homosexuality and pedophilia "are often intrinsically linked" and to tie homo sex to beastiality, incest, and rape.

Sears and Osten don't seem so worried about sexual assault, however. They approvingly cite former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger's 1986 comment that gay sex is an "offense of 'deeper malignity' than rape." (Burger, by the way, was quoting Sir William Blackstone, with whom he agreed.)

We couldn't get ahold of Sears and Osten, but we did speak to Terry Thompson, a fund attorney in Alamo who backed away from the quote. "I wouldn't give Blackstone high marks as far as theology goes," Thompson said. "When it comes to ranking sins, I'll leave that up to God."

He also downplayed the discrimination issue, though he admitted, "there's a fear that religious groups will be forced to hire someone who's practicing some sort of behavior they don't agree with. It's a great concern. Churches also don't believe in adultery – will they be forced to have members who are adulterers?"

In Thompson's opinion, same-sex marriages will pave the way for incestuous marriages – he gave the example of a hypothetical mother and daughter who get hitched solely to take advantage of the tax code – and legalized polygamy.

On the other side of the spectrum, Berlet says San Francisco shouldn't underestimate the fund, noting that it's bankrolled by five of the most muscular conservative Christian groups, most notably James Dobson's Focus on the Family, which boasts an annual budget of more than $100 million.

"Focus on the Family have their own zip code," Berlet said. "They are probably the largest Christian right group in the U.S. People can't just appreciate how big they are."

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