Father Peter's Forum

INTRODUCTION

Anyone interested in Christian character education would be interested in this topic. Anyone interested in promoting good solid Christian moral standards here and across the world will be interested in this topic. No one likes to be tricked. No one likes to be made a fool of. No one likes to be manipulated. This article talks about manipulation in a moral area of importance to our children, families and country. Please read over and pray over this material. You and I have a vital role to play.

Val J. Peter

All of us adults know how easy it is for marketers to convince children to buy certain kinds of cereals or certain toys or certain games. What most of us adults do not know is that the gay movement in America is using very sophisticated marketing techniques to sell an issue, namely, acceptance and approval of their lifestyle.

The postmodern age in which we live is called the Age of Marketing by many experts. It was preceded by the Age of Aquarius starting in the late 1960s where some of the media insisted the individual was supreme, where self-centeredness was exulted, where narcissistic self-interest was proclaimed to be the meaning of life. It was a time when the individual was exulted. The new Age of Marketing, which we live in today, is one in which the individual is not exulted, but rather manipulated.

This is in large part due to the advances that have been made in the area of social manipulation by marketers. In the olden days, we were all aware of the powerful marketing that went on for children. We’re way beyond that now as certain narrow ideological groups in our society are employing marketing techniques intentionally to condition adults to arrive at, not our own conclusions, but their desired conclusions.

The 4 P’s of marketing are progress, price, place and promotion. Today gay rights folks are not selling dishwashers or autos. They are selling an issue, namely acceptance and approval of their lifestyle, but the methods are the same.

Tammy Bruce who styles herself a lesbian feminist and is the former President of the L.A. chapter of NOW says: “In each case, the critical thing is not to let the public know how it is done.” The purpose of this little article is to let you know how it is done. Remember the adage: “forewarned is forearmed.”

In the old days, the traditional way to price products was thought of in marketing as an exchange of bipartisan satisfaction. That exchange relationship is not critical to gay marketing. What is critical is something called “exaction pricing.” This simply means that the gays will exact an emotional price from targeted groups for not buying into the gay rights idea.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In 1973, the American Psychological Association, through political pressure, changed its position and no longer put homosexuality in the category of a mental disorder in the DSM. This was a marketing decision and it was the first step towards achieving the goal of normalization by the gay rights movement. And it starts with convincing people that homosexuality is not bad, but simply an alternative lifestyle. That’s where marketers come in.

By 1988, two Harvard trained social scientists, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, wrote a homosexual marketing plan “dismissing the movement’s outworn techniques in favor of carefully calculated public relations propaganda…laying the groundwork for the next stage of the gay revolution and its ultimate victory over bigotry.” Kirk and Madsen said: “To one extent or another, the separability and manipulability of the verbal label is the basis for all abstract principles underlying our proposed campaign.”

The campaign has three phases and you can recognize each one of them in the media today. Phase one is called desensitization which Kirk and Madsen describe as a “continuous flood of gay related advertising, presented in the least offensive fashion possible.” They want to flood the market with gay people who look normal, who do normal things so that the public no longer takes a double look at people identified as gays.

In this desensitization phase, you want to have well-known people, even ministers, priests and bishops with good reputations stand up and proudly say they are gay. That is very helpful to their cause. The movement was successful in producing a movie like Brokeback Mountain and they made sure the Academy Awards noticed it. The movement sees it good to write books for school children such as Joey Has Two Mommies. The movement says it is good for a parish to be gay friendly when a gay couple wants their adopted child baptized. This is all part of desensitization. It is good to have gays on the news helping with community service and suggesting gayness is all genetic and these are really very nice people. They want parishes to welcome gay parishioners publicly. Kirk and Madsen say: “It is not overt coercion. It is one group’s covert orchestration of compliance by another group through structuring the consciousness of the second group.”

In other words, the whole idea we need to remember is that this is nothing more than conscious manipulation of you and me to change our Christian views without realizing they are manipulating us. This first phase, namely, desensitization, is clearly seen in the June 2008 document or game plan sponsored by nine pro-homosexual groups which is called “Make Change, Not Lawsuits.” Don’t be surprised that this June 2008 document says the first step is desensitization. Start with winning over your Christian family and your Christian friends. Insist that they treat a gay married couple the same as any other couple. Make gays feel you are very nice Christian folks. The document says: “ (Gay) couples who want to should get married, call themselves married, and ask (sometimes demand) that family, friends, neighbors, businesses, employers and the community treat their marriages with respect. Making the marriages of same-sex couples a conspicuous part of American society will help us get something we’ll need to win ultimately, namely, public acceptance.” Get state legislatures to see this public acceptance and pass gay friendly legislation.

In other words, the whole idea we need to remember is that this is nothing more than conscious manipulation of you and me to change our Christian views without realizing the manipulation involved. The second phase is “exaction pricing,” a new pricing concept defined as “the economic and emotional price being exacted from target groups for not buying the gay rights agenda.” It is also called jamming, making use of associative conditioning and direct emotional modeling. Rondeau calls exaction pricing “psychological terrorism meant to silence expression or even support for dissenting opinion.” It is a scare tactic. It is threatening to verbally beat up anyone who opposes the gay agenda. In this regard, shouting, yelling, hollering and fiery rhetoric are powerful marketing tools. Make people use the word gays (less offensive), not homosexuals. Call gays a humble, long suffering minority, not a savvy group wanting recognition. Call all opposition homophobic. Laugh the Christian opposition to scorn. Ridicule them publicly. Look at what they did to Dr. Laura. They forced her apologize publicly. Scare preachers by suggesting there will be laws forbidding them to claim the scriptures are opposed to homosexual activity. Make it a crime of hate speech. Show pictures of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and murdered. As Kirk and Madsen say: “Gays can undermine the moral authority of homo hating churches…by portraying them as antiquated back waters, badly out of step…with the latest findings of psychology.” Phase two is exacting a price for opposition, namely, jamming the opposition into silence. That is way phase two is also called jamming.

The third phase is conversion. Kirk and Madsen call it “ the conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind and will through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.” Gays laugh to scorn the Sacred Scriptures. They say: “Why would you rely on Scripture?” After all, Exodus 21:7 talks about a good price for selling your daughter into slavery. Then there is Exodus 35:20 where you must kill your fellow employee who works on the Sabbath. And remember, they say, Deuteronomy 14:18 where the Chicago Bears would have to wear gloves rather than touch the skin of a pig. The goal is to have you and me say: “Live and let live.” They want us to say: “I’ve changed my mind.” Rondeau puts it this way: “Pederasts, gender-benders, sadomasochists, and other minorities in the homosexual community with more extreme peculiarities would keep a low profile until homosexuality is in the tent. Only strong and favorable images of homosexuals should be displayed.”

It is important, finally, to remember that ministers, priests, church officials and bishops are very self susceptible to what Rondeau calls the illusion of being informed and enlightened. Why? Because they are pastoral people, and they need very much want and need to be liked. They very much want and need to be seen as caring, sharing and compassionate. If being liked takes first place, then truth takes a second place, or even a third place. This is a great temptation of any mega church or any popular preacher, namely, to bring vast crowds into the fold at the expense of truth.

If this slick marketing or environmental conditioning wins the day, what will they say 100 years from now? Will they look at our age as having made a giant step forward in human progress, or as an example of early mass marketing gone astray? That is Rondeau’s question and mine, too.

P.S. If you have to read one article, it would be Paul Rondeau’s Selling Homosexuality in America in Regent Law Review in 2002. It is an excellent presentation. I rely on it for this article. He introduces his reader’s to the most widely recognized model today for marketing, namely, The Elaboration Likelihood Model by Petty & Cacioppo. You can read about it in Terrence Shrimp, Advertising, Promotion (6^th edition), a marketing textbook in common use in university marketing courses. He demonstrates the ways for marketing to convince us to buy things or ideas or practices without even noticing that we are being convinced by others.

Please pass this article on to as many others as possible. Don’t be tricked or duped by the cleverness of these folks.