By Peter LaBarbera

Sometimes in advocacy work against sexual revolutionaries, you make arguments and inferences that you know are logical and sensible, but at the time they seem a bit theoretical, and it is easy to doubt yourself. The strange thing about the anything-goes world we have entered, though, is that the awful specter you predicted comes faster and more brazenly than you would have thought possible. It happened with “same-sex marriage” — an absurd mimicry of normalcy now embraced by many liberals — and it’s happening with other similarly bizarre concepts and sexual behaviors.

While homosexuals certainly cannot be blamed for the entire, sordid Sexual Revolution, the “gay pride” (GLBT) movement has paved the way for a perversion explosion among “heterosexuals.” For if it’s perfectly acceptable for men to sodomize other men in the name of “love” — and lesbianism and bisexuality and now transsexuality to be treated as OK (while it’s NOT OK to judge them as wrong) — then what on earth is stopping other perverts like Tristan Taormino (above left) from pursuing the same popularity and acceptance? And ditto for “poly rights” in the law.

In the case of Taormino, this is one of those rare instances in which calling someone a “pervert” seems like a quaint understatement. The author of a “lesbian erotic” book, she is also apparently the world’s biggest advocate of anal sodomy for women and also a champion of  “polyamorous” (or “poly,” i.e., multiple-partner) relationships. Taormino is also scheduled to speak at the “Winter Wickness” sadomaschistic event scheduled to be held tonight and tomorrow at the Holiday Inn Columbus-Worthington Hotel in Columbus, Ohio. Thousands of calls have poured into the hotel (614-436-0700) and its parent corporation, International Hotels Group (800-621-0555), from concerned pro-family Americans urging that the event be shut down — and from sadomasochistic activists urging the hotel not to block the event.

Below is her Amazon.com bio, showing her reach into pop and “mainstream” culture (say it isn’t so, Redbook!), followed by a “Poly Pride” keynote speech she gave in New York City.–Peter LaBarbera, www.aftah.org

Tristan Taormino is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, and educator. She is the author of four books and editor of eighteen anthologies, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning series Best Lesbian Erotica. Her popular Village Voice column “Pucker Up” is nationally syndicated. Tristan has been featured in over 250 publications including The New York Times, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Entertainment Weekly, Details, New York Magazine, and Men’s Health. She has appeared on The Howard Stern Show, Loveline, Ricki Lake, and on HBO, CNN, MTV, and The Discovery Channel. She lectures at top colleges and universities and teaches workshops around the world.

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Poly Pride Keynote Speech
Tristan Taormino
October 4, 2008; [emphasis added by AFTAH]

Thanks to Polyamorous NYC [New York City] for hosting this and all the other events this weekend in celebration of Poly Pride, and especially to Birgitte and Lyndell for inviting me to be here, and Antonia, Justen, Patrick, Rich, and Mark for their organizing efforts.

When I was researching my new book on open relationships, I read the classic 1973 book Group Marriage by Larry and Joan Constantine, which was based on interviews with people all over the U.S. who were living in group marriages. Back then, the Constantines found their first interview subjects through a very loosely organized group that published a newsletter called “The Harrad Letter” and held sporadic meetings somewhere in New England. From there, the couple tracked people down through word of mouth, even innuendo and gossip. They followed up every lead they got by writing letters to people asking them to participate in their study. Then, they packed up their Volkswagen Squareback and made six cross-country trips in three years to talk to these people. It’s pretty remarkable to think that they had the courage to literally drive to the homes of complete strangers, knock on their doors, and talk to them about something no one was talking about back then.

Thirty five years later, here we are in Central Park, and looking out into this crowd today, obviously a lot has changed. People interested in consensual non-monogamy have many resources at their disposal, and we no longer have to drive cross country to find each other. This is due in large part to the work of educators and activists within the growing polyamory movement. But while we can connect, network, and support each other, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding about our relationships. Many of us cannot be open with our loved ones about our lives for fear of being ostracized or discriminated against. We face ignorance and hostility because we dare to challenge two intertwined institutions: marriage and monogamy.

Marriage as we know it is changing. Conservatives would say it’s under attack, under fire. I say it’s just under construction. And hopefully, this fall on Election Day, we can also say it’s under new management. Queer people are at the forefront of the movement to re-define marriage right now, and unfortunately—with typical divide-and-conquer tactics—the Right Wing has pitted queers and polyfolk against one another. Conservative Stanley Kurtz said “Among the likeliest effects of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and ‘polyamory.’ Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals (however weakly and temporarily) in every conceivable combination of male and female.” As if that is a bad thing? Celebrating more love and more commitments between consenting adults?

Some gays and lesbians have responded to the charge of the “slippery slope” by calling it ridiculous, but others have defended gay marriage by denouncing polyamory. What about those of us who are queer and poly? Queers and polyfolk have a lot in common, and we need to recognize the ways we can help each other. Queer people must stand up and say we believe in the rights of everyone to love, commit to, and marry whomever they want. We must not throw polyamory under the bus in favor of advancing queer marriage rights.

We need to listen to each other and learn from each other. The polyamory movement can learn a lot from the GLBT movement. The poly community must strive to be an INCLUSIVE community. We cannot turn our backs on poly swingers or solo polyamorists or that one really slutty poly friend we all have. We cannot shrug off monogamous folks who want to be our allies. We need to embrace all those people around us who are challenging monogamy in some way and who believe in the rights of people to protect their relationships, whatever form they take. And we need to find a way to change the climate in this country, by creating community to foster a larger awareness and understanding of multi-love relationships.

People ask me a lot, “What did you learn from the people you interviewed for Opening Up? What do they all have in common? What makes open relationships work?” There are some common principles. Honesty. Self awareness. Trust. Communication. Boundaries. Commitment.

And this may be what is scariest of all to our enemies: we practice what they preach. We have values. We have many of the exact same values they that they claim over and over we don’t. Values is such a loaded term, it has become laced with religion and morality and the conservative right wing has tried to equate values, like family values, with a heterosexual, 2-parent, married, nuclear family. We need to reclaim the word values. We need to rip it out of the hands of pundits and bigots and stand up to defend OUR polyamorous values.

Our society is poised to change dramatically in the next decade. Like other minorities before us, polyamorous people need to come out when it’s safe to do so and educate our loved ones, our neighbors, our doctors and others around us about our lives. We need to tell our stories. I’ve had the privilege to hear the stories of hundreds of people in non-monogamous relationships. Like Leslie from Minnesota whose two husbands supported her through chemotherapy after she was diagnosed with cancer. Or Cat in Oklahoma, who lost custody of her children for being polyamorous. Or a poly circle of four in the Pacific Northwest who have owned a house and raised their kids together for over fifteen years. We must speak our truths. If we don’t tell the world who we are, people are left to imagine, to fall back on stereotypes, to create fictions which don’t represent us.

Larry and Joan Constantine took a leap of faith thirty five years ago and started knocking on doors to find others like them. We need to take a cue from them and start busting down some doors of our own. If we join together, support each other, and increase our visibility, we can only get stronger. And we need our strength because WE are at the forefront of those who will redefine love, commitment, and family in this century.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzegger (R) chose to elevate political correctness over truth in responding to the California Supreme Court’s arrogant ruling for homosexual “marriage.”

The Dead Kennedys punk rock band prophetically sang in 1979:

Your kids will meditate in school!
Zen fascists will control you…
Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It’s the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece…California über Alles.

Whether people recognize it or not, we live not in a California-created world but in a divinely-created world, where government gets its binding authority (the sword) from God to promote good conduct and disallow bad. This is why the state governor is introduced as “his Excellency.”

We now observe a “brave new world” of radical, “cool” diversity, where the word “excellence” is politically incorrect. It’s everywhere. Last week, the British government okayed the creation of animal/human embryos, legalized, for the sake of lesbian maternal desires, the elimination of the father as an essential part of a family, and the European Court on Human Rights agreed to hear a case brought by a chimpanzee (actually its handlers). By increments, our modern world abandons all belief in human dignity as bearing the image of God. In the same week, not to be outdone, California legalized gay “marriage.”

Already “His Excellency,” the [California] Governator [Arnold Schwarzenegger], has:

• greeted this legal decision with enthusiasm;
• stated that personally he is against it;
• refused to back a future public referendum in favor of exclusive heterosexual marriage;
• salivated about the economic boom that such “weddings” will bring to California.

So much for moral excellence–or even rational coherence.

Four “California-dreaming” judges made legal what the Bible calls “unnatural,” using of the sword, not to restrain evil but to compel citizens to embrace it. Going beyond Massachussets, they granted “strict scrutiny” to “sexual orientation,” that is, the highest protection of law in all areas of society. Gay groups understand. “The suede/denim secret police,” the “gentle people,” already have plans to bring the full force of the “law” on those “uncool nieces” who oppose this half-baked legal ruling, including the removal of the right of ministers to perform heterosexual weddings, the end of tax-exempt status of their churches, and the risk of jail for refusing to homosexuals “equal treatment.” Already Gavin Newsome, mayor of San Francisco, announces that civil servants who have conscience problems should find another job!

A culture, founded on deeply considered religious principles, must now ditch two thousand years of Western civilization, and be forced to affirm the rightness of acts that have never been shown to be anything but behavioral choices. There is no scientific evidence of a “gay gene.” Who or what belongs in this non-defined category of “orientation”? What do we do with “ex-gays”? What is an “ex-black,” or someone with an Hispanic “orientation”? Can two gay brothers now marry?

Is this the point where God “gives over” a culture” to the implications of its immoral choices, cosmetically gussied up as “law,” and where Christians speak up and go to jail?

Certainly we must use the little swords we are given–the vote and other legal means–to counter the trend towards sexual license. We must uphold the law in order to bless all creatures and bring people to Christ. At the same time, we must realize that we are opposing the rising star of libertine neo-paganism, capturing the minds of our youth with the seductive message that everything, including sex, is evolving to new forms, and that God the Creator is a dispensable, even dangerous myth. Many are being seduced by ideas like “transhumanism” that sees the human species as only at beginning of its evolutionary progression, while “progressive Christian” liberals tell us that the “Christian tradition…must situate [itself]…within the evolutionary processes of the earth.”

For the first time in human history, homosexual “marriage” has been given a binding, legal status. It is therefore the watershed issue, the flashpoint of a deeper agenda. By judicial fiat, “hetero-cosmology,” the belief in difference–between male and female, right and wrong, and, by implication, between God and the creation–is declared illegal. Only “homo-cosmology,” the belief in sameness–of sexes, of religions and of divine and human, now enshrined in school text books and UN documents–will be tolerated. Those supporting it will eventually promote a polysexual and polytheistic society; those opposing it will affirm the male-female binary and the creator/creature distinction as the over-arching cultural norm. The choice is not new–its between Baal or Jahweh.

Right now, even many pastors fail to see these vast implications. Emergent (evangelical) pastor, Brian McLaren, refuses any judgment on “gay marriage”–to avoid offense! Emergent (evangelical) pastor, Doug Pagitt, openly affirms the compatibility between homosexuality and Christianity, having already openly denied the Creator/creature distinction! The Baptist minister of a large LA church, asked by the Los Angeles Times what he would do if requested to perform a gay “wedding,” incredibly replied: “I’d have to prayerfully think about it”! That confused cleric, alas, is prayerfully half way down the aisle, California über alles oblige.

“Gay marriage” causes us all to pray, not just for homosexuals and for our homophile culture, but also for the defense of Church and for the next generation of Christians against this great seduction!

Born in Liverpool, England, and a boyhood friend of John Lennon, Peter Jones (cwipp@cwipp.org) has a Th.M from Harvard and a Ph.D from Princeton. He taught New Testament in France for 18 years, and at Westminster in California for 12 years, where he is now scholar-in-residence and Adjunct Professor. Author of many books (see cwipp.org), he is Executive Director of truthXchange, a ministry devoted both to understanding the nature of the “new spirituality” and to formulating a Christian response. He can be reached through CWIPP at 760-480-8474.

Jones has a BA from the University of Wales, an M.Div from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and is currently an ordained minister with the Presbyterian Church in America. He is married to Rebecca and they have seven children.

If you have been helped by this newscwipp from Dr. Jones, and know a young person (or a pastor!) struggling with these issues, check out his book, The God of Sex, available for purchase on our website, www.cwipp.org. With a gift of $40.00 or more for our ministry, truthXchange, you will receive a complimentary copy for your own library.