MassResistance has joined the ranks of Religious Right groups that are expanding the global reach of their efforts to resist legal equality for LGBT people, boasting in recent months of its anti-equality efforts in Mexico and Nigeria. Now, as Taiwan moves toward becoming the first Asian nation to embrace marriage equality, the Massachusetts-based group is helping mobilize opposition from Taiwan’s socially conservative Christians.
In a Tuesday blog post, MassResistance calls attention to an article published on Christmas Eve by Central News Agency Taiwan noting that anti-equality groups have been using the group’s anti-marriage-equality booklet and video, which have been translated into Chinese. Arthur Schaper, head of MassResistance in California, “has been working tirelessly with Taiwanese activists, expatriates in the US, and others to get the word out.”
According to MassResistance, Schaper has been working with Taiwanese evangelical churches in the Los Angeles area and corresponding with “a Catholic priest who is the secretary of the Chinese Regional Bishops Conference in Taiwan.” The group says Schaper is also lobbying individual Taiwanese legislators.
Schaper is a commentator for right-wing sites like BarbWire and Townhall, where he has been an enthusiastic Trump booster and has mocked news reports of Russian interference in the election. In a December 7 post on BarbWire, Schaper said these were the talking points he had sent to a reporter in Taiwan:
- Homosexuality is destructive.
- It is neither genetic nor an innate characteristic of human beings: a very inconvenient truth for the Left.
- Homosexuality and transgenderism are not civil or natural rights, but behaviors.
- Marriage—by design, biological recognition, as well as societal and civil preference—must remain for one man and one woman.
- Gay marriage is not progressive, but regressive. Ancient Romans and Greeks engaged in similar “gay marriages”, to the utter destruction of the Ancient Western world.
MassResistance is headed by the intensely anti-gay Brian Camenker. This fall, Camenker bragged that anti-marriage-equality activists in Mexico were using MassResistance materials on the threat posed by marriage equality. MassResistance also announced that the group had started a chapter in Nigeria, where same-sex behavior and advocacy have already been criminalized.
Camenker and MassResistance oppose any compromise with LGBT advocates, as the group’s report on Taiwan makes clear:
As we’ve seen here in the US, pro-family groups that are inexperienced in the “gay marriage” struggle have a tendency to want to compromise on the issue, hoping that it will mollify the LGBT lobby.
We’ve been seeing media reports that some of the Taiwanese pro-family groups are calling for a “special status” of same-sex partnerships to be created – such as civil unions or domestic partnerships – instead of giving up the word “marriage.”
This is the road to hell, as they say. It simply doesn’t work. Arthur is doing his best to warn the Taiwanese about this, in the strongest possible terms.
In every situation we’ve seen so far, once the LGBT lobby gets civil unions or domestic partnerships, they simply use it as a stepping stone and leverage it to what they really wanted all along – changing the definition of marriage.
Another thing we’re seeing in Taiwan: pro-family people want to avoid criticizing LGBT behavior as being destructive or immoral. In effect, they accept the opposition’s position that it’s “just another way to love someone.” So instead our people use less provocative and weaker arguments. That was tried over and over again here in the U.S. It tends to make the LGBT movement even more bolder and aggressive than they otherwise would be.
Last year, Camenker spoke at a one-day anti-gay summit held on the eve of the World Congress of Families gathering in Salt Lake City Utah. He disagreed with fellow activists who called for “speaking the truth in love.” Camenker said, “I think there is a place for being insulting and degrading, and I think I can back that up by scripture,” adding, “I think we have to look at this as a war, not as, you know, a church service.” More from our coverage of that event:
Camenker said that in the Old Testament, “God has two sets of laws regarding how you treat your fellow man.” One is how you treat your neighbor, who you might work with and forgive. “There’s a whole different set of rules for people who want to tear down society, who want to push immorality, who want to tear down the moral structure of society.” That set of rules is “very brutal,” he said. “God says those people who want to do that must be destroyed.”
He said the LGBT movement is a “house of cards” that is “held together by force, intimidation, and propaganda” and can be destroyed by standing up to it, the way communism was. “We are in a war,” he repeated, saying of gay-rights advocates, “They would send us to concentration camps if they could.”
