Box Turtle Bulletin

Prop 8 Amicus Brief Filer Calls For “International Intervention,” Charges Gay Parents With “Slave Trade”

Jim Burroway

January 31st, 2013

Robert Oscar Lopez

Yesterday, I posted this about a couple of unusual Amicus Curiae briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the Justices to uphold California’s Proposition 8. One of those briefs, by David Benkof (a self-described gay columnist who opposes same-sex marriage), Robert Oscar Lopez (who describes himself as a bisexual man who was raised by two lesbian mothers and who is currently heterosexually married), and Doug Mainwaring (a man who raised two teenage sons after separating from his wife and coming out gay, and is now back living with his wife), tries to make the case that there is some kind of heretofore undiscovered groundswell of gay people opposing marriage equality. It begins with a statement arguing that “Americans ought not be labeled hateful bigots for opposing redefinition (of marriage).”

I suppose that argument can be made generally, but in Lopez’s case, it’s hard to find another word which would adequately describe his views on the subject. Lopez, an assistant professor in the English Department at Cal State Northridge, posted on this blog last Sunday something that he seems to regard as a major rallying cry. Titled, “Statement: Though I support LGBT dignity, I call on the human rights community to fight human rights violations by LGBT organizations,” it is written in outline form — patterned after other Very Important Declarations which are composed of numbered paragraphs and subparagraphs so that scholars and historians can cite the each Very Important Point without ambiguity. And what a manifesto it is. He begins by arguing that ”the democratic process in Western nations and the judicial system of the United States have failed, for over twenty years, to deal in good faith with the bioethical and social-justice problems” posed by LGBT rights advocates. And because of that failure, he calls for some kind of “international intervention”:

II. I state the following without a party affiliation, since I cannot in this case agree with the right wing’s usual resistance to international intervention, nor can I endorse the left wing’s ideology of gay equality, which currently presages a large-scale global human-rights crisis in order to meet the affective demands of gay couples for rights to ownership of children.

…VI. The legal system, academia, the fourth estate, the judicial system, and the political process in the United States have proven themselves inadequate in some cases, grossly negligent in others, totally powerless in some instances, but consistently failing in correcting the human-rights crisis precipitated by the modern LGBT movement and its systematic violation of the rights of children, not only in the United States but also overseas, its continued assault on the dignity of human fatherhood and motherhood, and its increasing complicity with human trafficking, its fraudulent propaganda, its bioethical improprieties, class exploitation, contempt for the democratic process, and violations of the basic principles of free speech, free exercise of religion, and academic freedom.
VII. The time for intervention is now because:

1. With the increase in the number of people entering adulthood identifying as gay (see recent Gallup polling), and encouraged by popular culture to acquire children to express their equality, the human rights crisis will worsen. The sheer volume of same-sex couples who view children as an entitlement and who see their need for equality as overriding the rights of others will aggravate the problem.

2. The usual institutions that would normally identify an oncoming human rights crisis and thwart it are malfunctioning in the United States …

Does he want some kind of military or paramilitary intervention? International sanctions? Statement of condemnation from the United Nations? He doesn’t say, but we do know why. In this piece posted the same day at American Thinker, where he links to his manifesto as a supporting document, he describes what he calls “the oncoming human rights crisis… caused by the LGBT movement.” As Lopez sees it, that crisis manifests itself in the children that gay couples are raising, which Lopez calls “human trafficking“:

The movement to liberate same-sex love began because people loved each other. Somehow, through convoluted digressions, it has become a tyrannical octopus seeking to control life and death itself.

The Rubicon was crossed when the gay movement sided with human trafficking; graft-ridden dirty deals with warlords for orphanages; bio-engineering, baby-farming, and emotional deprivation of innocent children by forcing them to replace a biological parent with a fictional same-sex partner. Naturally, any child forced into such a psychically traumatic origin fantasy who feels resentful about it will be cursed by its caretakers as not only ungrateful, but also a homophobe.

Lopez describes himself as the son of a lesbian mother who was raised by two women. In this post that he wrote for the Witherspoon Institute in which he praised the Institute’s flawed Regneres paperclaiming to study “gay parents,” Lopez contends that his childhood was marred due to the lack of male role models, and claims that he still fails to pick up on what he calls “unspoken gender cues that everyone around me.” That’s why, he says, “I have trouble in professional settings because co-workers find me bizarre.”

Okay. 

But whatever complaints he may have against his moms’, whatever pain, anger, scars and traumas he may have experienced as a child, for all we know, they may be wholly legitimate. But whatever reality in which those pains may be grounded evaporates when he deploys his imagination against gay parents, which he charges with facilitating a new “slave trade“:

…The fight for marriage has never been about marriage. Marriage is the only way to have legal cover and shield themselves from criticism for their bioethical stunts.

Market demand is a powerful thing, and it is growing because of the increase in LGBT couples as well as the cultural messages convincing young gays that they will be given children or else society is oppressing them. Here in Los Angeles, I’ve seen the eerie proliferation of designer babies in gayborhoods, and the increasingly anesthetized reaction of gay couples’ friends. People go to third-world getaways to pick out babies, place ads for surrogates who can give them a certain eye color, and even collaborate with human trafficking. Never forgetful of my own pains as a lesbian’s son in the 1970s, I see the faces of these gay couple’s children, and sometimes, I have to run away and cry. I know the dazed glare, the powerlessness of these children, their helpless desire to please their parents, their fear of showing their parents any sign that the arrangement has been hurtful.

And yet, I can scarcely forget, this is only the beginning. While some say “it gets better,” all signs show that it will grow far worse. LGBT activists have been frustrated so far by the largest Western nations’ resistance to legalizing gay marriage. In this table, a Francophone researcher discusses the gay-marriage statistics from Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Quebec. Remember that France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, the more populous nations of Europe, have still resisted full marriage equality. Already in tiny Belgium, 5% of marriages are same-sex. What will happen with the combined populations of Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States — 570 million people in all — legalize gay marriage, with 5% of that mass being same-sex couples looking to buy babies?

We are staring into the dawn of a new slave trade. Rather than let the Middle Passage happen and then spend centuries trying to exonerate our nation, we must be “on the right side of history.” Stop gay marriage — not because of hate for gay people, but because the machine that is turning people into chattel must be stopped. The only way to break the cycle and wake everyone up is stop gay marriage.

Benkof, Lopez and Mainwaring write in their brief (PDF: 127KB/ 14 pages) to the Supreme Court, “We believe strongly that opposition to gay marriage need not be rooted in hatred towards gay people” and caution the Court against “brand(ing) the views of millions of Americans ‘discriminatory’ or rooted in animus.” But obviously Lopez’s views are rooted in animus, and a very deep-seated one at that. There’s simply no other way to describe it.

Prop 8 Amicus Briefs, Brought to You by the Lunatic Fringe

Jim Burroway

January 30th, 2013

Dozens of organizations and individuals have filed Amicus Curiae briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing either for or against California’s Proposition 8. A couple of them are worth looking at, if for no other reason than for their entertainment value. For example, there’s this brief filed by Margie Phelps for Westboro
Baptist Church. Amicus Curiae briefs are expected to follow several conventions, and the ways in which Westboro’s brief observes them is indicative of Westboro’s highly entertaining approach to things.

First, instead of being a brief in support of petitioners (the pro-Prop 8 side) or respondents (the side that wants to overturn Prop 8), Westboro’s brief is filed “in support of neither party.” Okay.

And then there’s the Table of Authorities. A typical brief will be loaded up with citations to case law, along with other citations to “other authorities,” which would include sources like studies, articles, books, speeches, transcripts, etc. Of Westboro’s 66 citations under “Other Authorities,” 36 of them are Bible quotes. Which means that there are several pages with nothing but reproduced bible passages, including five pages devoted to the entire story of Sodom and Gomorrah. (“This historical event described in Genesis 19:1-28, Holy Bible, must be considered at this hour…”) The brief also has a lengthy retelling of the Great Flood (“The description of the complete destruction of all mankind – a population as or bigger than today’s population…”).

And after all that, Westboro concludes:

Same-sex marriage will destroy this nation. If the leaders of this country treat what God has called abominable as something to be respected, revered,and blessed with the seal of approval of the government, that will cross a final line with God. The harm that will befall this nation, when the condign destructive wrath of God pours out on a nation that purposefully, in a calculating manner, institutionalizes marriage licenses for same-sex unions, is the ultimate harm to the health, welfare and safety of the people. The government is duty bound – in this Christian nation – to institute the standard of God on marriage, and pass and uphold laws that forbid same-sex marriage.

By the way, Westboro filed an identical brief for United States v Windsor, which challenges the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. If nothing else, I guess that ensures both consistency as well as economy.

Another interesting brief (PDF: 127KB/ 14 pages) calling for the court to uphold Prop 8 comes from a man by the name of David Benkoff. It’s been nearly four years since we last heard from him. Here’s how Timothy Kincaid introduced him to BTB readers in 2008:

David Benkof has been getting a bit of attention lately.

And at first glace David appears to be a young gay man who believes that there are better options for gay couples than marriage, that the community should join him in prioritizing other more pressing issues, that the marriage discussion is harming the efforts of gay couples in red states to get recognition for their unions, and that he wants to help. We’d also think that he’s a gay columnist, that he speaks for an influential collection of gay thinkers, and that he is part of the gay and lesbian community and shares our goals and dreams.

None of that is true.

During the Prop 8 campaign, he trotted out his gay/straight/bi/Idunno-guy-against-same-sex-marriage schtick with a web site called “Gays Defend Marriage,” in which he claimed to be a “gay columnist” who was against same-sex marriage. Timothy Kincaid exposed the charade, Benkoff doubled down, and then he abruptly left the scene, saying he “recently learned quite a bit of disturbing information that makes it impossible for me to continue supporting a movement I no longer respect.”

Well, he’s back now. And for this amicus brief, Benkof teamed up with Robert Oscar Lopez (described as a bisexual man who was raised by two lesbian mothers and who is currently heterosexually married), and Doug Mainwaring (a man who raised two teenage sons after separating from his wife and coming out gay.) Again, we see a familiar pattern: people with life credentials which are supposed to demonstrate their connection to the gay community but who are arguing that the gay community needs to be shown its second-class place in society. Lopez has been playing that schtick at the Witherspoon Institute, which sponsored the flawed Regneres paper claiming to study “gay parents.” Lopez contributed an anti-gay tract at the Witherspoon Institute’s web site praising Regnerus’s paper. Mainwaring is a NOM discovery, who wrote in opposition to same-sex marriage in a tea party newsletter and, more recently, in The Christian Post. Their brief includes all of the standard NOM talking points — watered down and polited up, like NOM might be when on its very best behavior — to try to make the impression that there is an undiscovered reservoir of gay people who oppose marriage equality:

Amici  come from a variety of families of origin, we have different religious beliefs and we differ among ourselves about whether legislature should redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. We all believe, however, that Americans ought not be labeled hateful bigots for opposing redefinition.

Our position is based on a shared commitment that marriage is society’s institutional expression of a child’s right to a mother and a father. We are not alone. The ongoing debate over marriage in France has prominently featured gay people who support keeping the understanding of marriage as a union of a husband and wife.

We, and they, believe gay people should be free to love and live as they choose but we also recognize that society has a right to express a rational preference for the kind of unions necessary to the survival of the whole society, and to the well-being of children. Some gay, lesbian and bisexual people will benefit from this preference as they marry a person of the opposite sex.

As you can well guess, Benkof and friends are utterly silent about how LGB people might “benefit from this preference.” They just kind of put that out there. The rest of the brief is basically 14 pages of concern trolling amidst a complete absence of actual facts. (Interestingly, they don’t even bother to mention the Regnerus paper.) It’s much like the Westboro brief that way. Birds of a feather…