Tradition Family and Property

Last year, when the Smithsonian hosted “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” a groundbreaking exhibit exploring gay and lesbian themes in American art, the Religious Right unified in protest. Inspired by a CNSNews story titled “Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts,” and egged on by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, the campaign against the exhibit quickly gained the support of soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Within a day they succeeded in pressuring the Smithsonian to remove the most controversial work from the exhibit, David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly.

Last week, the exhibit opened at the Brooklyn Museum, famously the site of the Giuliani-fueled controversy over the 1999 “Sensation” show. Within days, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn sent a letter to the museum protesting the exhibit, and a small coalition of GOP elected officials followed up with a letter accusing the museum of “Christian-bashing.” New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser also weighed in, calling the Wojnarwicz work “a revolting piece of slime.”

However, the museum hasn’t budged in its support for the show, and the Right’s efforts to censor the work have mostly fizzled. Donohue himself has decided it’s not worth expending too much effort –instead simply issuing a statement reiterating his disgust with the exhibit and accusing Wojnarowicz of bringing about his own death from AIDS.

Left to fill the vacuum so far have been a far-right Catholic group inspired by a Brazilian fascist movement and an artist who was previously known for painting a heroic George W. Bush on horseback holding Osama bin Laden’s severed head.

On Sunday,America Needs Fatima, a campaign of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), held a protest in front of the museum. TFP is a spin-off of a Brazilian movement that has been called “neo-fascist.” TFP’s foundational text is a treatise by founder Plinio Correa de Oliveira, which argues that the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Communism have in their turn undone a natural order that must be restored. While the main American branch of TFP mostly focuses on anti-gay propaganda [pdf], America Needs Fatima is dedicated to organizing “anti-blasphemy” campaigns against targets like The Da Vinci Code, editorial cartoons and Madonna’s planned performance at the 2012 Super Bowl.

The other notable protest against the Brooklyn Museum has been that of Staten Island artist Scott LoBaido, who was thrown out of the museum after showing up with a painting of the museum’s director sitting on a toilet filled with green muck. LoBaido has been protesting art that he sees as blasphemous since at least 1999, when he was arrested for throwing horse manure at the Brooklyn Museum to protest the “Sensation” exhibit. His own work is not always negative, though. Along with his year-long project painting flags on rooftops across America, LoBaido has created fawning, heroic portraits of Ronald Reagan and of George W. Bush brandishing the head of Osama bin Laden.

Every so often, an obscure but well-heeled group called the American Society for Tradition, Family and Property pops up on the scene to make its case for ... well, tradition, family, or property.

Today it is out with a press release announcing a press conference tomorrow where it will release its lengthy defense of keeping gays out of the military

Reacting to the current push to force the U.S. military to accept open homosexuals in the Armed Forces, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) published a well-documented study today, providing hard-hitting reasons to reject the proposal.

The group's statement is titled "To Keep Our Honor Clean: Why We Must Oppose the Homosexual Agenda for the Military."

News Conference: Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, and leaders of several major organizations will participate in a Thursday press conference to announce their support for the 1993 law regarding homosexuals in the military. The news conference will be held at the Marriott Wardman-Park Hotel (room 8216) in Washington, D.C. at 2:00 PM.

The document itself has already been posted on the TFP website and it is something to behold:

[D]uring wartime, men are in continual contact with each other’s blood. Therefore, the well documented increased disease rates of homosexuals would cause them to be perceived as a risk rather than an asset to unit survival.

This increased disease rate should not be underestimated. As Colonel Ronald Ray pointed out: “Despite the fact that they account for less than 2 percent of the total American population, a compilation of recent health studies shows that homosexuals account for 80 percent of America’s most serious sexually transmitted diseases.”

This increased disease rate has led some to refer to the homosexual lifestyle as a “deathstyle.” Inclusion of this deathstyle in our Armed Forces is a dangerous proposition, indeed.

TFP's citation for that 80% figure is "Colonel Ronald D. Ray, USMCR, Gays: In or out? (Washington: Brassey’s (US), 1993) p. 46."  I can't find the report itself ... but it doesn't matter because it is obviously nonsense.  To get a picture of the sorts of insanely anti-gay things Ray has written, just check out this essay he wrote entitled “Lifting The Ban On Homosexuals In The Military: The Subversion Of A Moral Principle,” especially the conclusion in which he warns to any effort to allows gays to serve in the military will cause God to destory America just like he did to Sodom and Gomorrah.

But the real reason that TFP opposes the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is because it would destroy the honor of our military: 

It is these values of uprightness, self-sacrifice and strength that project the military into a superior order of things. In a word, they confer an honor upon it, which is so identified with the archetype of the American soldier that our nation’s highest military decoration is called the Medal of Honor.

However, homosexual vice represents the opposite of this military honor. It violates natural law, epitomizes the unleashing of man’s unruly passions, undermines self-discipline and has been defined as “intrinsically evil” by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church on numerous occasions.

That is why, in order to advance, the homosexual movement must blur the distinctions between virtue and vice; truth and error; good and evil. If this vice is imposed on our Armed Forces, it will necessarily bring this relativistic spirit with it.

In turn, this mentality would undermine the direct and straightforward mindset, so necessary to the military.It would sully the honor of all who serve and weaken society’s notion of the incompatibility between good and evil, so well represented by our Armed Forces.

I am really looking forward to seeing who those other "leaders of several major organizations" will be that will be joining TFP and Elaine Donnell at their press conference releasing this document tomorrow.

Not surprisingly, the Religious Right is upset at the failure of an effort to block California’s recent same-sex marriage decision from going into effect. “[N]ationwide legal chaos,” predicted the Alliance Defense Fund. The decision “abolishes the meaning of motherhood and fatherhood,” opined Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. A “further extension of their judicial activism,” said Pacific Justice Institute’s Brad Dacus.

At the same time, readers of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Times were confronted with an enormous advertisement urging them to “join the Crusade” of “conscientious resistance” to “the homosexual ‘moral revolution.’”

An obscure but well-heeled group called the American Society for Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) ran ads today covering two full pages in those newspapers, warning of the threat of same-sex marriage. The ad echoes the now-common Religious Right theme that equality for gays and lesbians would lead to the “persecution” of Christianity, but with 4,600 words in some of the most expensive print around, TFP apparently tried to make the argument in the least succinct way possible, discoursing on Nazism, the definition of truth, various Vatican publications, and Joan of Arc.

By legalizing same-sex “marriage,” the State becomes its official and active promoter. It calls on public officials to officiate at the new civil ceremony, orders public schools to teach its acceptability to children, and punishes any state employee who expresses disapproval. …

Left unchecked, this anti-Christian trend will become an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and our American way of life that we do not hesitate to call persecution. …

As the homosexual revolution’s anti-Christian intolerance makes itself felt through increasingly persecutory measures, a terrible problem of conscience arises in any who resist: Should we follow our consciences? Should we give in?

For Catholics like ourselves, the condoning of same-sex “marriage” would be tantamount to a renunciation of Faith. …

This is a battle for the soul of America. The so-called Cultural War is gradually becoming a Religious War.

Tradition, Family and Property is an unusual group. Founded in 1973 after the anti-Communist writings of a Brazilian dissident Catholic activist, TFP brought a unique style of protest—serious young men with red capes, heraldic banners, and brass bands—to issues ranging from abortion, homosexuality, and contraception to anti-Communism, water subsidies, flag burning, and the Gulf War. While the group doesn’t have the name recognition of the more media-savvy Catholic League, it still brought in $6.8 million in donations and sales in 2006.