A few of you know I’m in the middle of my 1970-1990 counter-evidence study, in which I dive into books on both extremes of the so-called culture wars, reading everything from radical feminists to conservative preachers to understand some of the things that were happening in the United States at the time from the perspective of those in the trenches. Reproductive technology, the draft, the role of women in the home, divorce, prayer in school, gay rights, political alliances, employee compensation… there was a lot going on and I was only alive for the last eight years of it. Some of the authors were unhinged, having lost all objectivity. Some of the authors were prescient, foreseeing the damage things like no-fault divorce or out of wedlock births would do to the poorest among society. Some had a persecution complex. Some were idiots. Some were brilliant.
One of the things that hit home, though, given my charitable foundation’s work on anti-suicide donations for teenagers and kids that was started four years ago was a little known book by one of the bestselling Christian authors of the past quarter-century, a man by the name of Tim LaHaye. Known mostly for writing the “Left Behind” series that smashed New York Times sales records with tens upon tens of millions of copies sold, and for his rather strong anti-Catholic streak (he thinks the Catholics are essentially a false church full of false prophets who are going to doom the world), the man, now pushing 90 years old, has a body of work that offers a glimpse into a very large part of the evangelical movement at the time, which is valuable for my research purposes.
[mainbodyad]LaHaye is sort of a walking, talking embodiment of a certain brand of 20th century bigotry that goes far beyond his rather intense Catholic hating. He was born in 1926 and graduated from Bob Jones University in 1950. While one must be wary of the horns and halo effect, yes, this is the same Bob Jones University that hated black people so much it refused to enroll them until 1975, and even then, only did it after adopting prohibitions on interracial dating and marriage (even joining a political group that fought for equal marriage rights between whites and blacks would subject you to expulsion from the university).
Yes, the same Bob Jones University that teaches young-earth creationism (that the planet is only 6,000 years old) in its science department.
Yes, the same Bob Jones University that requires male students to get permission from the dean before dating a female student.
Yes, the same Bob Jones University that, today, regulates the personal iTunes libraries of its students, banning “Any music which, in whole or in part, derives from the following broadly defined genres or their sub-genres: Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Electronic/Techno, Rap/Hip Hop or the fusion of any of these genres”, even if the music itself is Christian. To “ensure personal accountability” of this policy even headphone use is regulated.
Go ahead. Read the 2013-2014 Student Handbook. I dare you. You’re going to love it. Then, imagine how much worse it would have been when he earned his degree in 1950. [Update: I went through the student handbook and excerpted the best parts.]
Given how much influence LaHaye’s books had in certain circles, and how many American homes contained his work, one of the titles on my reading list was called The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know About Homosexuality. It was written at a time when gay activists had finally organized among themselves and demanded basic protections. This took considerable courage as, in many states, being gay remained a crime (in my own home state of Missouri, it remained so for part of the area up until 2003 when the Supreme Court struck down the law as an unconstitutional).
I didn’t really know what to expect in terms of either social prescriptions or theology, other than knowing this book was, at one time, the go-to manual for a conservative family that discovered they had a gay child. I had no idea how bad it was. Dear God, it’s no wonder so many of these young kids killed themselves. In a literal sense, no hyperbole intended, the closest parallel I’ve ever read is the anti-Jewish literature in the buildup to World War II and the “anti-negro” writings of white southerners in the aftermath of the Civil War through the Civil Rights era. LaHaye is right up there with the pre-reformed George Wallace. Part of me wants to acquire his works and fund a museum somewhere to demonstrate how brainwashed by hatred and prejudice a person can be. This is an incredible example of irrational ideological animus.
It was bad enough when I was growing up in the 1990’s but I now understand why there was so much collateral damage to those who survived this period. It makes sense why otherwise talented men like famed mutual fund investor Christopher Browne at Tweedy, Browne & Co., ended up becoming depressed and alcoholic, never getting over the wounds of childhood. Growing up in the same generation right behind this guy, and having adults like this formulating public policy, would leave scars so deep I’m not sure how easily one could recover. I’m so grateful I was born in the modern world.
Here are just a handful of excerpts from the book. Imagine being 14 years old and your parents making you read this because they found out your secret. The suicide rates make sense now. Keep in mind this was considered a compassionate Christian book on the market about the topic at the time. Writings like this were the reason we now have a generation of old Senators and pastors being caught with hookers and in public bathrooms while insisting they are straight. The psychological damage is profound.
What Character Traits Do Gay People Have According to Tim LaHaye?
According to Tim LaHaye, gay people are liars…
[M]ost homosexuals are the best liars you will ever meet. Their techniques of distortion or evasion are almost impeccable. They have learned the art of deception so well that they can look you straight in the eye and tell a barefaced lie while maintaining a look of complete innocent. Many times they have outmaneuvered me. – Page 44
According to Tim LaHaye, gay people are self-indulgent and unable to control themselves…
I have met only one homosexual who was not a self-indulgent, self-centered, undisciplined individual. – Page 76
According to Tim LaHaye, gay people are selfish…
When one takes into account all the heartache and suffering homosexuals cause other innocent people, particularly those who love them most, it becomes quite clear that homosexuals are usually very selfish people. – Page 47
According to Tim LaHaye, gay people are suspicious…
Of course, homosexuals are often supersensitive and suspicious … – Page 150
According to Tim LaHaye, gay people are angry and hate women…
… a large percentage of homosexuals reveal an excessive amount of hostility. They are particularly angry at women; some even find it difficult to carry on a working relationship with women. – Page 51
According to Tim LaHaye, gay people may be demon possessed…
No doubt some homosexuals are indeed demon possessed. – Page 141
According to Tim LaHaye, gay people might be vulnerable to demons even if they are cast out…
Even after a demon is cast out, if indeed that is necessary, the individual still has to overcome the homosexuality that caused him to become so rebellious toward God that he made himself vulnerable to the demons in the first place. – Page 141
According to Tim LaHaye, gay people are so obsessed with sex they can’t hold down jobs or have careers…
It is impossible for a straight person to imagine the preoccupation with sex that obsesses many young homosexuals. In fact, they are regularly disinterested in gainful employment – their interest is sex, not work. Besides, when a man overindulges his sex glands, he doesn’t have much energy left for work. – Page 35
Got it so far? Gay people are lying, self-indulgent, selfish, suspicious, angry, women-hating, possibly-demon possessed monsters who are unable to control themselves. The compassion is overwhelming.
Murdering Gays Might Have Been Totally Compassionate According to Tim LaHaye (But He Still Loves Them and This Isn’t Persecution)
According to Tim LaHaye, he loves gay people…
I love homosexuals, but I hate their sinful life style that contagiously reaches into the minds of otherwise normal young people. – Page 153
Even though, according to Tim LaHaye, gay people are a disease comparable to a plant infection…
Homosexuality is a blight on humanity … – Page 150
According to Tim LaHaye, many parents would rather have their child die than turn out gay…
Many such parents would prefer the death of their child to his adopting the unhappy wretchedness of homosexuality. – Page 157
Speaking of which, according to Tim LaHaye, even when they were murdered by friends and family, it’s kinda cool because having your head split open by rocks being thrown at you was really compassion…
[When talking about the death penalty for gays in the Old Testament] This may seem “cruel and inhuman treatment” by today’s standards, but our leniency has caused today’s widespread problems. This is not to suggest that Christians advocate the death penalty for today’s homosexuals, but I do have a question that needs consideration. Who is really being cruel and inhuman – those whose leniency allows homosexuality to spread to millions of victims who would not otherwise have been enticed into this sad and lonely life style, or those who practiced Old Testament capital punishment? – Page 107
According to Tim LaHaye, you know that despite practically every gay ever telling you they’ve known since they were a child, just like straight people, it’s totally a choice for them to be gay because otherwise God is completely unfair when He said they should be murdered.
God would never have commanded the death penalty for homosexuality if a person was really “born that way.” All capital punishment was for crimes a person committed voluntarily. Homosexuality is no exception (Leviticus 20). – Page 187
According to Tim LaHaye, since it’s not okay to kill the gays anymore, people should still try to stop them from getting laws passed to protect them against housing or employment discrimination…
[If a gay rights ordinance passed protecting against housing and employment discrimination] You will not be able to refuse to rent your home to mating homosexuals, even if your straight children are being raised next door. Straight employers will not be able to hire only straights; that freedom will be gone. – Page 196
Employment and Housing Protections According to Tim LaHaye
According to Tim LaHaye, the gays only want these rights so they can spread their depravity, not live in peace.
Add to that the basic anger that characterized all homosexuals, plus their obsessive selfishness, and you begin to understand why they are so driven to make their depraved life style widely accepted. – Page 109
According to Tim LaHaye, Americans need to do their part by stopping further efforts to show leniency to gays such as decriminalizing consenting relationships.
What Can Be Done? 1. Write letters to local state and national leaders opposing any further leniency toward homosexuality. – Page 205
According to Tim LaHaye, this means making sure that if they are teachers, they should be fired, and if they aren’t, they should never be allowed to teach any subject.
The following suggestions are offered with the hope that many will act on them. [snip] 3. If legal in your state, help organize an initiative petition to your state constitution, prohibiting homosexuals from becoming school teachers. – Page 153
According to Tim LaHaye, you don’t need to feel bad about this because gays can get their job back at any time, they just need to quit being gay…
If they [homosexuals] wish to teach school, they have three alternatives: 1. Stop being homosexual – and that is their choice. – Page 155
According to Tim LaHaye, none of this even matters because firing them from their teaching jobs is not discrimination…
The Briggs initiative [the proposed constitutional amendment in California that called for firing all gay teachers and prohibiting them from working near children, defeated by the help of Ronald Reagan] does not discriminate against homosexuals, but it does protect school children from being taught perverted sex by a homosexual. – Page 177 & 178
According to Tim LaHaye, that’s important because gays aren’t born that way (remember, that would make God cruel), so obviously they must recruit like the military or Amway, only instead of getting you to go to basic training or sell soap, they might rape you as a child…
As I have said before, if some homosexuals didn’t recruit, they would become extinct because they do not propagate. [Followed by a page of newspaper articles talking about children being molested and raped] – Page 193
The Gays Must Be Stopped or Else Everyone Will Want To Become Gay
According to Tim LaHaye, you might be recruited to gayness if you’re not careful…
But since it is impossible for homosexuals to propagate, they must recruit to enjoy companionship, sex, or both. – Page 94
According to Tim LaHaye, you really need to get this point. The gays are gonna get you if you allow them the right to rent an apartment without being thrown onto the street by a landlord that disapproves.
… the minute the gay rights bill passes, they will come out of their school closets, propagandizing brainwashing, and indoctrinating our youth, and an increased number will begin brazenly to entice, recruit, and in some cases even molest. – Page 199
According to Tim LaHaye, just in case you missed it, this is still not persecution…
[Under the heading “Don’t Persecute Homosexuals”] We do not wish to persecute homosexuals. We are, however, opposed to the propagation of their life style by perverting our children, which is the only way their sterile system can continue. – Page 154
According to Tim LaHaye, gays are unhappy not because they are discriminated against but because their very existence is wretched and disgusting. Americans need to stop gayness from spreading because otherwise everyone will want to be gay.
… rejection by a straight society isn’t the cause of their [gay people] miseries; their miserable life style produces its own anguish. [snip] It would be cruel and heartless for our society to destroy laws that keep it from becoming contagious. – Page 191
According to Tim LaHaye, this is a real concern. Being gay is like the Dead Swamp of Middle Earth, calling all men into its clutches…
It is not compassion that causes a Christian to stand idly by while a few militant homosexuals create a climate that will sweep additional millions of victims into this macabre way of life. – Page 152
If This Happens, There Will Be More Murder and Global Destruction
According to Tim LaHaye, America has to be careful because gays might have already destroyed the world once. Their amazing powers of destruction by being in love are on par with Storm from X-Men…
… many Bible scholars think one of the major sins that brought on the Flood [the Bible story in which God killed every man, woman, and child on the planet, sparing only Noah and his family in an ark that contained all the animals of the world] was homosexuality. – Page 204
According to Tim LaHaye, at the very least, if we’re nice to gays, there will be a lot more crime and murder…
A homosexually lenient society will cause an increase in crimes and sadistic murders. – Page 199
According to Tim LaHaye, this is because gays are more sadistic than straights…
… a much higher crime potential and tendency toward sadistic violence exists among homosexuals than among straights. – Page 200
According to Tim LaHaye, you aren’t feeling urgently enough about this because if you don’t keep gays from having equal rights, your kid could be raped and murdered at school…
Now do you understand why I say that legalizing homosexuality is dangerous? If our society begins to indulge this sinful life style and homosexuals double in the next decade, so will their violent crimes. Homosexuality is not only an unhappy way of life, but it produces misery for its victims, many of whom are innocent. One six-year-old boy was recently violated and killed by a thirty-four-year-old homosexual; all the boy did was go to school that day. – Page 201
Tim LaHaye Didn’t Know the Difference Between Gay People and Transgender People (or “Don’t Name Your Daughter ‘Stephanie'”)
According to Tim LaHaye, gays and transgender people are the same thing…
Some male homosexuals find it impossible to have an erection in the presence of a woman (even though they may love her as a person) because they think of themselves as a woman sexually, in spite of their male genitals. – Page 130
According to Tim LaHaye, if your child does turn out transgender, it might be your fault, dad, because you picked the wrong baby name…
It is well known that unwise parents have psychologically damaged their children by rejecting their sex. A father, for example, may have given his little girl a name like Roberta or Stephanie, not because he liked the name, but because he had expected a boy and intended to call him Robert or Stephen. [snip] Although most such children eventually grow up to be heterosexual, some are so threatened by this confused sex role that they identify excessively with their own sex. In extreme cases, they hate their own genitals because they keep them from being the opposite sex. This is one of the causes of transsexual operations. – Page 78
Even Though Professionals Claim They Can’t Change Sexual Orientation, and Have Never Seen a Successful Case of It Being Done, Tim LaHaye Says You Should Ignore Them
Even though the best psychiatrists agree sexual orientation can’t be changed, Tim LaHaye is having none of it…
A prominent Los Angeles psychiatrist reports, “In all my years of counseling, I have never cured a homosexual, and I don’t know of any other psychiatrist who has, either.” – Page 95
So Tim LaHaye asked lots of professionals about it and they kept telling him it couldn’t be done…
In talking to psychiatrists, psychologists, and other counselors, I have asked two questions: 1.) Have you seen any homosexuals change the direction of their sex drive and make a satisfactory conversion to a heterosexual life? 2.) Do you know of any other counselors who have? To both questions, I have received consistently negative answers. – Page 95 & 96
Solution? Tim LaHaye concludes you may never be attracted to women…
In all honesty, there is no guarantee you will ever become heterosexual. – Page 137
This means, according to Tim LaHaye, you should live alone for the rest of your life…
… you may be called on to live an asexual life. – Page 138
Or marry a woman, anyway, since one doctor thinks you might be able to get yourself to like it (ignoring the countless examples of broken families elsewhere in his books after spouses finally gave up and divorced, leaving shattered marriages behind)…
Dr. White points out that in his experience, homosexuals who want to change can marry and set in motion a chain reaction in which heterosexual experiences gradually increases their ability to experience heterosexual pleasures. – Page 89
And that’s the point, according to Tim LaHaye. Being attracted to men totally doesn’t make you gay as long as you ignore it…
It is not wrong to have a homosexual or temptation. Many people do. A homosexual is one who allows his urges to be fanned into passions by fantasizing or thinking about them until he commits a homosexual act. – Page 142
According to Tim LaHaye, you’re only gay if you ever have sex or enter a relationship…
This study of homosexuality should enable you to distinguish between homosexuals and those who have homosexual feelings. – Page 115
But whatever you do, do not go see a professional according to Tim LaHaye! Especially if that professional has scientific credentials…
[On how to deal with a homosexual child] Six. Don’t Take Him to a Psychiatrist. Seek counsel with a Christian counselor who practices Christian counseling principles, never a humanistically-trained non-Christian psychiatrist or psychologist. Their ways are not God’s ways, they are notoriously unsuccessful in the treatments they prescribe [snip] Your child needs to be screened from the “professional” who suggests it is “normal” to be abnormal. – Page 164
If your kid does turn out gay, remember it’s not your fault according to Tim LaHaye (even though he says elsewhere it is) because he totally chose it himself and stop being gay whenever he wants…
… you didn’t make your child homosexual; he chose that life style and can choose to leave it. – Page 165
According to Tim LaHaye, Gays May Lead to Satan Himself Coming to Earth
On page 204, LaHaye goes on to explain that, at the end of the age, when Satan sends his version of a false messiah to Earth to doom everyone to hell, he (the anti-christ) may even be a homosexual because of a passage found in the the ancient writings of Daniel (chapter 11, verse 37). In fact, when LaHaye wrote a bestselling Left Behind series on the Apocalypse ten or twenty years ago, he wanted to explain how this living embodiment of evil – literally, the physical vessel of Satan himself – could have come into the world before destroying humanity and waging war against Heaven. He decided that the best way was to have a barren married couple consult with a Russian Luciferian priestess, who then has the husband – who, it turns out, is secretly a homosexual (obviously) – combine his and his boyfriend’s sperm into a demon hybrid sperm.
[mainbodyad]This isn’t a terrible surprise, though, because the anti-science hysteria isn’t anything new among his demographic. On October 5th, 2010 – yes, 2010 – USA Today’s Faith & Reason section ran a story called ‘Test tube babies’: God’s work or human error?, asking if children born from in vitro fertilization, even those to married straight couples, were children in the eyes of God or something else; a sort of ethical monstrosity that shouldn’t exist.
I’ve always known these people exist but to actually wade through 206 pages of this intellectual sickness over the past day leaves me in disbelief. These folks were real. They actually walked on the Earth among us and were real. He even has a formula on page 77 for how to produce a pre-gay during childhood.
The thing that comes to my mind, though, is a lesson my grandmother taught me. Her brother was a fundamentalist preacher in Southern Missouri. He used to say, “Ruby, if a man preaches against one sin all the time, you can bet that’s what he struggles with most. If he’s freaking out about alcohol, preachin’ on alcohol, asking if you have alcohol in your home week after week, month after month, he has a problem with alcohol.” That rule has proven true more often than not. Going through his body of work, LaHaye acts like gayness is some sort of seductive honey pot that, if you aren’t careful, you might be drawn to and before you know it, you’ll be listening to club music while mixing flavored martinis. Me thinketh the lady – who happens to bear a striking resemblance to Liberace – doth protest too much. I’ve never known a straight man to be romantically or physically tempted by other men, nor have I ever known a gay man to be romantically or physically tempted by women even if they spend decades trying to make themselves be attracted to females. That’s not how it works. Or, as the recent insurance commercial put it:
