In the panoply of bizarre quotes from crazed TV preacher Pat Robertson, it’s hard not to appreciate the true lunacy from this gem from March 1990: “[Homosexuality] is a pathology. It is a sickness, and it needs to be treated…. Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together.”
Given that Nazis put gays in concentration camps, it was more than a little odd for the Republican televangelist to connect homosexuality with “those people” with Hitler.
And yet, Jonah Goldberg, in his soon-to-be-infamous new book, “Liberal Fascism,” seems to make the same connection as Robertson. Sadly, No! has been documenting some of the more notable excerpts from Goldberg soon-to-be-remaindered book, and today highlighted this doozy:
Nazi attitudes toward homosexuality are a source of confusion. While it is true that some homosexuals were sent to concentration camps, it is also the case that the early Nazi Party and the constellation of Pan-German organizations in its orbit were rife with homosexuals.
It’s well-known, for example, that Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA, and his coterie were homosexuals, and openly so. When jealous members of the SA tried to use this fact against him in 1931, Hitler had to remonstrate that Rohm’s homosexuality was “purely in the private sphere.” Some try to suggest that Rohm was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives because he was gay. But the Rohm posted the greatest threat to Hitler’s consolidation of power because they were, in important respects, the most ardent and “revolutionary” Nazis.
Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams write in The Pink Swastika that “the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sadomasochists.” This is surely an overstatement. But it is nonetheless true that the artistic and literary movements provided the oxygen for Nazism before 1933 were chockablock with homosexual liberationist tracts, clubs and journals.
So, ol’ Jonah is right there with Pat Robertson — Nazis and gays do “seem to go together.”
Sadly, No! goes line by line, pointing out how truly silly this argument is, but I thought I’d just note this report from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The Nazi campaign against homosexuality targeted the more than one million German men who, the state asserted, carried a “degeneracy” that threatened the “disciplined masculinity” of Germany. Denounced as “antisocial parasites” and as “enemies of the state,” more than 100,000 men were arrested under a broadly interpreted law against homosexuality. Approximately 50,000 men served prison terms as convicted homosexuals, while an unknown number were institutionalized in mental hospitals. Others — perhaps hundreds — were castrated under court order or coercion. Analyses of fragmentary records suggest that between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were imprisoned in concentration camps, where many died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and murder.
But in the drive to demonstrate “liberal fascism,” Jonah Goldberg had to go beyond Hillary Clinton, Whole Foods, and Swarthmore grads, and he ended up here.
In 2008, this book will truly be the gift that keeps on giving.