The pro-family movement was slow to emerge in response to the Marxists’ “sexual revolution” strategy for dismantling Judeo-Christian civilization that was launched just after WWII. It began to coalesce during the national pro-life backlash to Roe v Wade in 1973, and had it’s first taste of cultural-street fighting specific to LGBT issues in the brutal Anita Bryant media takedown following her successful campaign to repeal a “sexual orientation” anti-discrimination ordinance in Dade County Florida in 1977.
Mrs. Bryant (we were still allowed to use “Mrs” as a prefix for prominent women then) was the first national symbol of pro-family activism, and thus the first victim of the Marxist smear-machine to be publicly vilified as a social pariah for opposing so-called “gay rights.”
During the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s the pro-family movement became a major political and cultural force, perhaps best represented by the 1986 Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v Hardwick, recognizing the right of states to regulate all sexual conduct (but especially homosexual sodomy) in the public interest. JFK appointee Justice Byron White wrote the majority opinion. Justice Harry Blackmun of Roe v Wade infamy wrote the dissent.
The power of the pro-family movement peaked in the mid-1990s and began to swiftly decline after the irresistible force of Christian constitutionalists met the immovable object of Marxist constitutional revisionism – in the form of Romer v Evans (1996), the first of four majority opinions written by Justice Anthony Kennedy establishing “gay” cultural supremacy in America.
Kennedy’s nomination to the high court had been forced on Ronald Reagan, after the same leftist power-block that destroyed Anita Bryant did the same to Reagan’s first choice, Robert Bork.
In Romer v Evans Kennedy taught the leftist bullies to frame all conservative messaging on LGBT issues as “hate” to render any laws based on conservative values invalid on their face as outside the scope of legitimate legislative authority. That turned the national battlefield over sexual health and morality in public policy into an anti-conservative “killing field” where virtually no-one who stands for traditional Biblical values can survive, since the presumed motive of “hate” by conservatives is deemed so threatening as to justify virtually any act of “self-defense” by leftists: what I call “the Antifa Sanction” and my friend and co-author Kevin Abrams calls the “Victim/Plunder Strategy.”
That’s why so few conservatives stand up to the hard left on LGBT issues and why those who do are true heroes. Here’s my top ten list of them, which I encourage you to use as a guide in your year-end giving. Apologies to other heroes not listed here, but the Lord put these on my heart.
- Mat Staver and Horatio Mihet of Liberty Counsel
- Brian Camenker of MassResistance
- Pastor Stephen Broden and Pastor Paul Blair of Gone2Far.org
- David Kupelian of WorldNetDaily
- Ex-Gay Spokesman Steven Black of First Stone Ministries
- Dr. Michael Brown of The Line of Fire radio show
- Bryan Fisher of American Family Association Radio
- Pastor Greg Young of Chosen Generation Radio
- Peter LaBarbera of AFTAH
- Scott Lively Ministries www.scottlively.net or via WePay
