I don't know how this information could be used to achieve anything in our fight, but I have thought that our fight against the anti-gays is really a bigger fight against bigotry in any form.  I have wondered from time to time if those who fight the hardest against us do so because we are the easier target in a much bigger war as they see it.  These people all have one thing in common, fear.  They fear a loss of percieved power and they fear change because it means things unknown to them. 

Like the 2002 FBI study on hate groups says, not all insecure people are bigots, but all bigots are insecure people.

I am reading a new book by Leonard Zeskind, called Blood And Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream.

While the various groups that make up the different white nationalist organizations make up less than one percent of the population, Zeskink proposes that the ideas that flow from these groups infect a larger percentage of the population and they are the basis not just for white nationalism, but for opposition to abortion, antipathy toward homosexuality, hatred of the federal government, especially the Internal Revenue Service, gun-rights activism, millennial beliefs, anti-immigrant fervor and a taste for Holocaust denial.

In the book he introduces us to many of the white nationalist beliefs and their proponants and how they have spread out into other areas of society and politics.  A large part of the book is about Willis Allison Carto, who also wrote under the name of E. L. Anderson, PhD.  Carto founded the now defunct Liberty Lobby in the early 1960's.  Carto, was an anti-Semite whose influence still spans the decades. After several failed attempts to gather similar thinkers to him and his ideas, he came to believe the best way to achieve his goals was to influence those already in power at the federal level. 

Early on, The Liberty Lobby worked very hard to create a faction within the Republican Party.  The Liberty Lobby supported George Wallace for President Carto noticed that 5 states in the heavily Democratic South had supported Republican Barry Goldwater's bid for president, and he came up with “The Conservative Victory Plan.” 

The plan spoke of courting white conservatives in the south into leaving the Democratic party and joining the Republicans because more blacks were joining the Democrats there.  Southern Democrats were notoriously
bigoted since the days of reconstruction.  It had been the party of the Klan after all.  It also spoke of a deciling white birthrate even before Roe v. Wade and the need to address the “problem.”  Today we see the end result of this plan in the “new” Republican Party.   

During the 1960's The Liberty Lobby published a newsletter, and a magazine called The Spotlight, that appealed to both anti-communists and arch-segregationists.  Among those influenced by Carto and his publications, either directly or indirectly were Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Robertson.  Jerry Falwell did, while Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson continue to influence huge segments of the population daily.  David Duke is still a voice of many in the Republican party.   Schlafly founded the Eagle Forum in 1972 to work against the ERA.  All but Schlafly have taken an anti-gay stand and actively work against our rights.  In 1992 Phyllis Schlafly's son came out of the closet, she has chosen to remain silent on the issues we face.  The Liberty Lobby supported Phyllis Schlafly's run for congress in 1970.

A lot of the book highlights the differences between “mainstreamers” who seek to temper their message in return for broadened public support and potential electoral success, and more militant “vanguardists.”

“Mainstreamers believe that a majority (or near majority) of white people can be won over to support their cause . . . vanguardists think that they will never find more than a slim minority of white people to support their aims voluntarily.  The vanguardists have built up small organizations made up of highly fanatical cadres and plan a naked seizure of power.”  Much like the Liberty Councel and it's followers.  Some of whom committed the murders in Arizona yesterday.

In the same way the white seperatist have divided into the mainstreamers and vanguardists, so too has the anti-gay industry. In the same way the White Seperatists, the Anti-Immigrationists and the Christian Reconstructionists fear change and a loss of power, so too does the Anti-Gay Industry. 

How do we as a group fight the fear they spread?  How do we become less afraid of them?  As Ralph Waldo Emerson said – “Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”