A semantic war on gays

BY NOREEN FAGAN: Social conservatives are inventing new words and phrases to stop gays from taking over the world.

According to a report in the Huffington Post, at last weekend’s Awakening conference at Liberty University in Virginia, a panel discussion toyed with new verbal tactics on how to kill the gay agenda with semantics.

Ryan Sorba, chairman of the Young Conservatives of California, described the term gay as “a left-wing socio-political construct designed to create grounds for fundamental rights [based on] whimsical capricious desires. Gay identity does not exist.”

Sorba proposed new words that could be used: same-sex attraction, same-sex intercourse, sodomy, unnatural vice and, later, anti-Christian.

None of the words seem new or outlandish to me; I just wish they’d showed more imagination.

From language, the conferences moved to more preposterous suggestions: homosexuality is the greatest threat to Christianity; gays are responsible for inserting a sexual anarchist agenda into public schools under the guise of bullying; promoting gays in the military presents a national threat; and same-sex orientation is hedonism repackaged.

If you can stomach it, read the whole report; it’s a great reality check and another reason to be happy we live in Canada. Although there are elections coming up, and, as Xtra has reported in the past, Harper is mum about his take on gays but is an open ally of the Christian right.

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