Dissenting from the Gay Agenda

From a comment on a Huffington Post link around the time of President Obama's inauguration:

What self-respecting gay would go near the Republican party? Any time in the last 20-30 years?....You would have to love being dissed and ignored and having people coming up to you asking why you haven't been reprogrammed yet, or else stayed in the closet.

Assumptions like those evidenced above are part of why I - a man who lives with same-sex attraction - choose to remain "closeted" and participate in the Republican Party as a libertarian-conservative.

It is true that the earliest realizations of my own homosexuality were coupled with the sense that it was a bad and a shameful thing I should hide. But as I grew older, I came to realize that the "gay pride" movement threatened something far more sinister than what any schoolyard bully could. I realized that publicly admitting this private characteristic meant, in some sense, surrendering my individual identity to a collective identity dictated by the "out" gay community. It would also mean accepting a label whose evolving meaning in our culture is not something I want to define me.

I experience same-sex attraction (SSA), but it is hardly the sum of who I am.

SSA is a part of my life that affects me in the most personal of ways, and I remain unconvinced that my SSA belongs to anyone else but me. For one thing, my having SSA doesn't mean to me what it apparently means to many Americans, gay or straight.

This distinction between SSA in my life and what "gay" has come to mean in our culture became more stark as I grew in faith as a Catholic man. What the Catholic Church and Bible teach about sex and gender made more sense to me than what our if-it-feels-good-do-it culture appears to believe about these things. I no longer see myself as a "gay man," as though homosexuality and heterosexuality were equivalent, but simply as a man. I am a male, complementary to a female, although a male with a predilection to same-sex attraction. My sexual orientation is not intrinsic to who I am the way my sex is. My SSA is just one challenge in my life that I have to deal with. All men and women have challenges in their lives and we are all responsible for discerning God's will in our lives.

Despite the excesses of the Sooper Trev character I play on Facebook and Twitter and in viewer e-mails to FoxNews.com's Strategy Room, in my life in the world, I reject the gay label, the gay identity, and the dominant gay cultural and political agenda for my country. Some will say this makes me a hypocrite, but I say I have reached my own conclusions based on my own experience.

I am not alone. The opinion and experience of same-sex attracted men and women is much broader and more varied than the self-proclaimed leaders of the gay rights movement would have you believe. Even among those who do accept a gay identity and who seek same-sex life partnerships, forcing social acceptance through government coercion is not the top priority of us all. Many self-identified gays and lesbians would prefer self-defense through the right to bear arms to the fleeting protection of PC "hate crimes" legislation. And many of us are more concerned with containing and defeating Islamofascism than we are with subjecting the mightiest military in the world to the social engineering exercise of repealing Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell.

For me, rejecting the gay label reinforces my dissent from gay collectivist allegiance to the Democrat Party and its victimology-based LBGT constituency groups like Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, PFLAG, GLSEN, and countless others exploiting and cashing in on the pain of the homosexual experience.

Thankfully there are other voices for same-sex attracted men and women in public debate besides the Leftist gay mainstream. I'm glad that a group like GOProud is out there. However, I'd hope anyone reading this understands that there are still, even to the right of that, plenty of us who experience SSA who maintain more traditional views on homosexuality. And we're not hypocrites for reaching our own conclusions.

So to the Huffington Post commenter I mentioned above and to those who agree with her: my self-respect comes in part from thinking for myself. I suppose I'll stay "closeted" as long as so many of my fellow Americans remain ensnared by the collectivist, politically correct, grievance-cult programming that you're trapped in. I reject your narrow labels and the presumptions behind them.