It used to be that a person who engaged in homosexuality kept it pretty much private. Everybody who knew about it, including the person practicing it, knew it was a shameful vice, a deviance from rightness, normalcy, and health. In the 1980s we even found out you could die of it, and that the disease was appallingly slow and horrible.

Today, incredibly, notwithstanding the obvious health risks, many of us have been conditioned (some to a greater degree than others) into believing this practice is not only not a vice but a virtue. Homosexuality is now being thought of, not as a deviance from rightness, normalcy, and health, but as everything from a permanent affliction a person has no control over (like a stutter), to a God-given vocation or noble calling, to a shining example of rightness, normalcy and health. It is softened and indulged by church leaders. It is excused in polite family company. It is lewdly paraded in our big city streets. It is awarded and congratulated in the media and academic worlds. It is protected in our public policies and courts. It is even being taught and mentored to our children. And those who speak out against this wholesale public promotion are increasingly being treated to ad hominem attacks, silencing, and punishments.

By the way, one of the lame arguments people often bring up at this point is, Who are you – the self-appointed moral police? As my older sister used to say when we were kids, If you were perfect it would be okay (to criticize). Okay. I am definitely not perfect. None of us are. But just because everybody falls short, makes mistakes, and sins doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and give up truth, common sense, and standards of character and morality that have worked for millennia. The very least we sinners should be doing is fighting to conserve all that we know to be good.

Back to our topic, we can trace this travesty to the revolutionary 1960s. The moral relativism and radical individualism emphasized in those tumultuous times have led many to the false conclusion that whatever a person feels, whatever a person identifies as, is good, regardless of anything else. We don’t even stop to wonder if that person is hurt, mentally ill, or motivated by something less than pure. Of course everyone knows there are still plenty of wrong things humans can do, like lie, steal, murder, and sexually abuse children. A few loud people with some influence and power just decided to take homosexuality off that list. (Actually, I suppose they’re in the process of taking sex for children off the list, too. Read: NAMBLA, pornography available to and targeting kids, pedophiles portrayed as victims, judges going soft on convicted child molesters, movements to have age of consent lowered, homosexuality being taught and celebrated in public schools, etc.)

Wait a minute. Did I say lie? Some people have decided that lying isn’t wrong at all, especially when, according to them, the lying accomplishes what they call “a greater good.” This Machiavellian tactic was touted by Kirk and Madsen in the homosexual “bible,” After the Ball, written in 1989. In this book these two evil geniuses outline a master plan to overthrow America’s standards of traditional sexual morality on a quest for acceptance of unlimited sexuality. I quote from “Behind the Rhetoric: the Social Goals of GLBT Advocacy in Corporate America" by Glen E. Lavy, who quotes from After the Ball.

“Begin by portraying gays “as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to adopt the role of protector”;

Present gays in the media as “wholesome and admirable by straight standards, and . . . indistinguishable from the straights we’d like to reach”;

Desensitize people to gay issues by inundating the media with GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) messages;

Convert people to the belief that gayness is good. “Conversion” means “conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.”

Lavy goes on to say that Kirk and Madsen recognized that material featuring gays as “icon[s] of normality” are lies, that gays know it, and so do “bigots.” But they say, “Yes, of course we know it, too. But it makes no difference that the ads are lies, not to us, because we’re using them to ethically good effect, to counter negative stereotypes that are every bit as much lies, and far more wicked ones . . .”

Well, they’ve accomplished their goal. Don’t a lot of us now think of this tiny portion of our population as “special,” “put upon,” “bullied,” “a minority?” It’s what kids are being taught in school. And don’t a growing number of LDS believe these poor people live lives of quiet desperation? Books are being written and published from this point of view – sounds like they’re being portrayed as victims. And it’s generally one big huge deception. When it comes to sexual proclivities, if you’re a healthy person, you are not a victim. You choose your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Bad things may have happened to you but you are still responsible for your own choices. Every healthy person has the power to choose, and to alter, his thoughts and feelings. People change their minds every day about something or other, for worse or for better.

Enter: Michael Glatze. Michael was the founder of a magazine for young, “gay” males. The magazine won great praise and awards. Personally, he lived the lifestyle for 16 years. Recently, he decided he wanted out. He got religion. And now he’s trying to undo some of the damage he did. He’s also being threatened and persecuted by people who were once his friends. Can you imagine the pressure he’s under? He needs our prayers. I quote:

“Homosexuality, delivered to young minds, is by its very nature pornographic. It destroys impressionable minds and confuses their developing sexuality.”

“Homosexuality prevents us from finding our true self within. We cannot see the truth when we are blinded by homosexuality.”

“Abnormal means ‘that which hurts us, hurts normal.’ Homosexuality takes us out of our normal state . . . It’s a neurotic process rather than a natural, normal one. Normal is normal - and it has been called normal for a reason.” He says that people are not homosexuals; they are heterosexuals with a homosexual problem. He reveals the truth that homosexuality is “completely a fabrication.”

“Now I know that homosexuality is lust and pornography wrapped into one. I’ll never let anybody try to convince me otherwise, no matter how slick their tongues or how sad their story. I have seen it. I know that truth.”

Click here to read an interview with Michael Glatze.

Please realize that I do not mean to primarily condemn sins of the flesh. Sins of the flesh are nothing new, and often rather pathetic. I think, in our panic to prevent the embarrassing and tragic consequences of sexual sin, many church-going people overreact to them. See if you feel that what C. S. Lewis wrote may be true: “Sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual; the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing; . . . the pleasure of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the animal self, and the diabolical self. The diabolical self is the worst of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute” (From Mere Christianity). I think what’s happened in the gay movement is a combination of the animal self and the diabolical self, a thing even Lewis did not predict as far as I know. He lived in that time when sexual immorality was still solidly thought of as wrong, and never imagined that such a thing as homosexuality could be diabolically twisted to take on an entirely new face.

No, this article is not about sins of the flesh but about deception. Put on your Book of Mormon thinking caps; we’re talking Gadianton robbers, secret combinations, bad judges. And what kind of people were these that took it upon themselves to spread lies to the whole world? I submit you’ve go to be awfully arrogant, godless, full of pride, to do that kind of thing. C. S. Lewis also wrote,“The essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: It was through pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: It is the complete anti-God state of mind.” There’s a famous talk by Ezra Taft Benson about pride we Mormons still refer to in which he states the same sort of thing. It’s when a person, in a spiritual way, generally turns away from the light, from what he knows is true and right and normal and healthy and decent and good, that the greatest travesty, the greatest sin, occurs.

When our son was in therapy to overcome unwanted homosexuality, he was told that the worst thing he had done in the midst of all his transgressions, was the deception he practiced, the lying he did to himself, to his family, to God. Oh, how he hated the double life he led in those miserable years! And the truth is, that duplicity he participated in deserved to be detested. It is the opposite of truth and goodness. And this is the type of deception that is at the core of the gay movement. It’s made to seem brave, honest and open, with the “coming out” and the “being who we are” business, but it’s just the opposite, and happily my son was never too far gone to realize that. He came back from those times when he was what they call in the Book of Mormon “past feeling.” Others can too.

I submit that the deception being practiced on the world concerning the nature of homosexuality, where is affects children and youth especially, is the worst thing about it. Generally speaking, the relatively few individuals actually practicing homosexuality (that mere sin of the flesh) and the misery and death that occurs is a tragedy that pales in comparison to the dangerous widespread deception that threatens to undermine the very foundation of our civilization, that is, traditional morality, that age-old objective standard of goodness and truth. This deception amounts to unrighteous dominion, despotism, tyranny, slavery, whatever you want to call the worst thing you can do to people. What I mean to say is that this movement is much bigger than most people think, and it affects us even now in terribly negative ways. It only takes one generation to completely corrupt a society, a culture, or a nation. And a corrupted nation opens itself up to destruction from within.

A quote from Thomas Jefferson inscribed in huge letters along the ceiling of the monument bearing his name states, “I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Make no mistake. The sexual revolution is not only about promoting licentiousness. Given the fallen state of mankind, it has evolved, quite naturally, into an attempt to replace God and enslave men by exploiting the sexual instinct through pornography and propaganda. Homosexuality, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc. – this “identity” we are now excusing, embracing, dignifying, celebrating, protecting, and preferring – is nothing but a fabrication and a means to a much more diabolical end.