Annihilation of the wicked BY AL DIAMON

Documents have recently come into my possession revealing the hidden agenda of the Christian Civic League of Maine. I’d prefer to claim I obtained the information from an anonymous source, because that seems more impressive than admitting the truth, which is that I got it from public statements by league officials and their allies.

These documents are not called "The Protocols of the Elders of the Christian Civic League," although that wouldn’t be a bad title, evoking as it does "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a hoax perpetrated by advisors of Czar Nicholas of Russia in the 1890s in a successful effort to provoke attacks on Jews. The league recently used its email newsletter, "The Record," to spread a similar scam.

The June 20 edition printed what it claimed was a "homosexual manifesto" originally published in the Advocate, a national magazine targeted toward a gay-and-lesbian readership. The article called for subjecting Christians and Orthodox Jews to "the most sustained hatred and vilification" if those religions refused to renounce their opposition to gay rights. It also demanded that marriage be opened up to same-sex couples or abolished, and the Bible censored to remove anti-gay passages. The league claimed this showed the homosexuals’ "hidden agenda in their own words."

The league should have checked its sources.

As Mike Tipping, author of the Maine Politics blog (www.mainepolitics.blogspot.com), pointed out, the "manifesto" was actually written by William Dannemeyer, a conservative ex-congressman from California, first published in his 1989 book Shadow in the Land. It was later circulated by the Miami-Dade Christian Coalition, which dropped all references to the original author and substituted the claim it came from a gay magazine. This fraud has been exposed several times, but like "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," it refuses to die.

Although Tipping posted this information on his blog within hours of the league sending out its email, the group has yet to run a correction. It has, however, devoted considerable space to lambasting other (allegedly liberal) publications for actual or perceived errors.

"[T]he secular media and the powers that be in the elite culture are disconnected from the real people," league director Michael Heath told the Morning Sentinel in November 2004. Apparently, he hasn’t seen the ratings for Desperate Housewives.

That the league intends to use the campaign leading up to the November referendum on the gay rights law to advance its position in the culture war should be obvious from statements it’s been making all year. Newspaper ads it ran in April for its political action committee, the Campaign for Marriage, claimed, "Our entire way of life as Mainers is at risk."

That same month, the group’s newsletter referred to gay rights as "the ideology of evil that is strengthening its death grip on all things decent."

A few days later, Paul Madore, head of the Maine Grassroots Coalition (a close league ally), told the Kennebec Journal, "If you want to look at who’s trying to silence the church . . . the pro-homosexual lobby is undoubtedly behind it."

And at an April 28 State House rally to kick off the petition drive to stop the gay rights law from taking effect, Robert Knight, a national anti-homosexual crusader invited to speak by the league, told the crowd, "If the gay-rights activists succeed at everything they do, you will see the criminalization of Christianity."

It appears these folks have spent too much time reading Dannemeyer’s hijacked protocol. And, like the readers of an earlier, equally phony protocol, they aren’t adverse to using that bit of flimflam to justify repression. Heath has said on numerous occasions that he isn’t just interested in denying gay men and lesbians their civil rights. He also favors making homosexuality illegal. If sodomy were outlawed, Heath wrote in a 2003 newsletter, "Things would be better." In a 2003 interview, Paul Volle, head of the Christian Coalition of Maine, claimed gay sex was a threat to public health. "Homosexuality is 10 times more of a risk factor than smoking," Volle said. "So apply the same standard."

Gay people should only be allowed to have sex outside the doorways of office buildings?

Heath may become even more extreme as the vote approaches, but it’s difficult to believe he could get much further from reality than he did in his newsletter last September, in which he claimed, "evil forces in our state are using [the term ‘sexual orientation’] to train your kids and grandkids that all sex — with anything, anybody, anywhere — is good, right and noble. A friend of mine accurately describes this as a ‘pansexual jihad.’ "

If the league wins the November referendum, you may need a permission slip from Heath before engaging in whatever forms of copulation are still legal.

When applying, be sure to use the proper "protocol."

I’ve already been told I’m going to hell. If you’ve got anything to add to that, e-mail me at ishmaelia@gwi.net