I know this isn’t particularly important, but I feel compelled to weigh in.
Jimmy Breslin, a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for Newsday, wrote a column for yesterday’s paper in which he relayed a story about bizarre anti-gay rhetoric he encountered from religious leaders at the 1992 Republican National Convention.
[Cardinal] Egan was there shoulder-to-shoulder with Jerry Falwell and the great Bush favorite, the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition. He is out of Anaheim, Calif., and now is in Washington because he has the big issue and he belongs downtown with it.
“Homosexuals are dangerous,” Sheldon assured me one day. He was a short man with eyes gleaming when he mentioned how bad homosexuals truly are.
“How?”
“They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual.”
“You should be confined,” I told him.
“I speak the truth for the Lord,” he said.
“You’re a fruitcake,” I told him.
“No, I speak the truth. They steal your son.”
Sheldon is now insisting the conversation never took place and that he never said such things. Breslin stands by his column. I though I’d take a moment to explain why I’m inclined to believe Breslin, or at a minimum, dismiss Sheldon’s denial.
Sheldon said in a statement yesterday:
“I have never met Jimmy Breslin, never had the conversation described in his column today and never said those sentences to anyone in my life.”
I obviously wasn’t at the RNC with these two, so I can’t say for sure whether Sheldon used these exact words or not. But I can say with absolute certainty that the rhetoric Breslin attributed to Sheldon is very similar to language Sheldon has used repeatedly over the years, which is why Breslin’s column is so easy to believe.
I’ve personally read dozens of letters Sheldon has written to his organization’s supporters over the years. These letters — with very few exceptions — include scurrilous and outrageous attacks against gays. I can’t link to the letters because they’re not online, but they’re real.
In August 1997, for example, Sheldon notified his supporters of a “homosexual conspiracy.” His January 2001 fundraising letter predicted a “homosexual invasion,” which could result in the “stealing of our children.” Just last fall, Sheldon called gay marriage “a social weapon of mass destruction” that “would destroy civilization as we know it.” In 1985, Sheldon even supported quarantining persons with AIDS in so-called “cities of refuge.”
In light of these confirmed quotes, Breslin’s column doesn’t even seem particularly controversial. Is it so hard to believe that Sheldon would accuse gays of trying to “steal” children in 1992 if Sheldon wrote a letter to his supporters nine years later saying that a “homosexual invasion” could result in the “stealing of our children”?
They’re the same message.
And one more thing. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, who has become more brazen in his partisanship over the years, described Sheldon as a “soft-spoken religious activist” today. There was no indication that Kurtz was kidding or being sarcastic.
This is sheer lunacy. Sheldon is one of the most strident religious right leaders in America, accusing gays and liberals of hating Christianity and actively trying to destroy civilization. In 2002, Sheldon argued, on national television, that God caused the terrorist attacks of 9/11 because He’s angry with America and wanted to “get our attention.”
For Kurtz to call this maniac a “soft-spoken religious activist” is to insult his readers’ intelligence.