By Paul Bremmer
The push for same-sex marriage is not a new phenomenon, according to a professor who has researched and lectured on the matter. Rather, it has been an integral part of the radical left’s playbook for well over a century.
“The idea there is a single, set, fixed, natural law-based, biblical law-based idea of male-female marriage – that has been steadily attacked since the 1800s,” said Paul Kengor during a recent speech at the Eagle Forum Collegians Leadership Summit. “It’s been going on for a long, long time, and the typical same-sex marriage supporter has absolutely no idea, no knowledge whatsoever, of that ideological history.”
At the summit, held at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., Kengor revealed the ideological history of the attack on traditional marriage, as laid out in his book “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage.” It began with the “ideological colonies” created in the early 1800s by a handful of radical leftists, including John Humphrey Noyes and Robert Owen.
Noyes horrified the New England Puritans with his talk of “collective marriages,” eventually getting himself booted from their midst. He settled in Oneida, New York., and founded the Oneida Colony, a communal enclave that practiced “complex marriage.”
Under this arrangement, any member was permitted to have sex with any other member and raising children was a communal responsibility.
Noyes founded that colony in 1848 and it became just another in a long list of failed attacks on marriage and family when it dissolved in 1881, after having abandoned complex marriage in 1879.
“These attempts by the Left to redefine and reshape marriage, they always – it doesn’t matter if it fails,” Kengor said, noting that 40 to 50 similar, more short-lived communities were set up around the same time. “They just think that whoever did it previously didn’t do it quite right.”
Another such community was the New Harmony Colony in Indiana, founded in 1825 by utopian socialist Robert Owen. The utopian colony collapsed within two years, but not before Owen released a “Declaration of Mental Independence” on July 4, 1826. He declared that man had always been a “slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race.”
He was referring to private property as well as “absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage.”
Kengor noted Owen made his declaration 22 years before the Communist Manifesto came out. In that well-known pamphlet, Karl Marx claimed destruction of the family as a Communist idea, writing this: “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”
Friedrich Engels wrote that under a Communist system, the family would cease to be the economic unit of society, and thus become obsolete. Marx and Engels once declared, “It is not possible to speak of the family.”
Kengor noted part of the Communist Manifesto’s 10-point plan was abolition of the right of inheritance. Marx and Engels didn’t like inheritance, he said, because it reinforced the idea of a family that could pass down property from generation to generation. What’s more, Marx and Engels wanted all women to forsake child-rearing duties, a move that would further weaken the family.
“They wanted all women out of the homes, into the factories, into the coal mines, into the fields, and they wanted homecare, daycare, home cleaning, all work around the home to be a nationalized function of the government,” Kengor revealed.
The leftist assault on the family continued into the 1920s, noted the professor. Alexandra Kollontai, a leading Marxist feminist of the Bolshevik Revolution, once proclaimed: “The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between your child and mine. The worker-mother must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia’s Communist workers. Communist society will take it upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child.”
The present-day Left has clearly adopted Kollontai’s idea. Kengor pointed out the eerie similarity between the Kollontai quote and this 2013 declaration from MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry: “We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children… We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
Kollontai was part of a Bolshevik regime that attempted to weaken the family by making abortion and divorce easy and commonplace, according to Kengor.
“The Communists, as part of their war on the family and marriage, one of the only things that they made free for people while they were banning religion, speech, assembly, bank accounts, everything else – the easiest thing you could do was get a divorce or get an abortion,” the professor said.
Within 10 to 15 years, Soviet Russia had sky-high divorce rates, according to Kengor. And abortion was so rampant that Josef Stalin banned it in 1936. (Nikita Khruschev brought it back in 1955.)
One American who was impressed with Soviet society was birth control activist Margaret Sanger, who once spoke to a KKK chapter in New Jersey. She traveled to the Soviet Union in 1934 and marveled at how mothers and children were under the care of the government. Sanger, who founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood, was appalled at the large number of abortions in Russia. However, she liked what the Soviets were doing with other forms of birth control.
“Theoretically, there are no obstacles to birth control in Russia,” Sanger later wrote. “It is accepted on the grounds of health and human right. We in America could well take example from Russia, where there are no legal restrictions, no religious condemnation, and where birth control is part of the regular welfare service of the government.”
That ought to sound familiar today, after the Supreme Court’s ruling that created a constitutional right to same-sex “marriage” in the nation, just the latest open attack on family units, Kengor noted.
“That’s where we are in America today, where birth control is part of the regular welfare service of the government,” he said. “And if you’re Hobby Lobby or Conestoga Woods or the Little Sisters of the Poor, who are celibate nuns, who take a vow of poverty, and you don’t want to be forced to pay for birth control, especially because it violates the teachings of your faith, progressives say, ‘We will see you in court.'”
The leftist assault on marriage and the family continued with the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School, according to Kengor. He said it is their ideas, more than any other Communist ideas of the past, that have infected the American education system today.
“America is not going to be an economically class-based, Marxist Communist model. It’s not going to happen,” he assured the audience. “The cultural Marxists in the 1920s understood that… anytime you give people a choice, they’re not going to choose to economically enslave themselves with Communism.”
Therefore, in the 1920s, leading Marxists concluded the keys to taking down the West were “culture, education, and sex,” according to Kengor. This included the dismantling of marriage and traditional family structures, as well as a takeover of colleges, universities, and mass media.
“What they did is they combined their version of Marxism with Freudianism,” Kengor lectured. “The cultural Marxists were Freudian Marxists.”
One cultural Marxist, Wilhelm Reich, wrote that a person’s sexual needs could be gratified by the same partner for a limited time only, and therefore monogamous marriage was not possible. Kengor revealed Reich once wrote about trying to have sex with his family’s nanny when he was four years old.
Another cultural Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, would influence the New Left of the 1960s. The New Left, according to Kengor, adopted the cultural Marxist idea that humans were naturally bisexual. This total rejection of the natural laws of sexuality became especially popular in the Weather Underground, where members tried to have intercourse with friends of the same gender.
In spite of this long, radical history, Kengor made clear the typical “gay marriage” supporter today is not a Communist. In fact, they are mostly ordinary people with good intentions.
Said Kengor: “The typical same-sex marriage supporter supports same-sex marriage for reasons that they believe are totally benevolent, for reasons of what they call ‘marriage rights,’ ‘marriage equality,’ but they have no idea that there are other people on the other side, very extreme side, who have very sinister motives with this, and for [the radical leftists], the modern same-sex marriage supporter is a gift from – I won’t say the heavens, because Marx and all these guys were atheists – but is just a tremendous gift that they never thought they would ever get.”
The issue has a history of failure that dates even a little further back. WND reported that it’s difficult to find any civilization that experimented with “marriage equality” and left any written record of how the experiment turned out in the long run.
But Michael Brown, who holds a Ph.D from New York University in near Eastern languages and literature and is the author of more than 25 books including his newest, “Outlasting the Gay Revolution: Where Homosexual Activism is Really Going and How to Turn the Tide,” says there are a few references throughout history.
One of those texts is from the Midrash, a collection of rabbinical teachings on the Torah. The rabbinical commentary on Leviticus 18 reads as follows with a not-so-subtle hint that something was going on among the Canaanites that caused them to be defiled in God’s sight:
“According to the doings of the Land of Egypt … and the doings of the Land of Canaan … you shall not do” (Leviticus 18:3): Can it be (that it means) don’t build buildings, and don’t plant plantings? Thus it (the verse) teaches (further), ‘And you shall not walk in their statutes.’ I say (that the prohibition of the verse applies) only to (their) statutes – the statutes which are theirs and their fathers and their fathers’ fathers. And what did they do? A man got married to a man, and a woman to a woman, a man married a woman and her daughter, and a woman was married to two (men). Therefore it is said, ‘And you shall not walk in their statutes.'”
Brown said biblical evidence suggests that such practices are not only considered sinful but a particularly grievous sin in the eyes of God.
“As to the question of whether homosexual acts are more vile in God’s sight than other acts, there is certainly a hierarchy of sin in the Bible, which is why some sins carried the death penalty (like adultery or witchcraft) and others did not (like eating pork),” Brown said. “Common sense would tell you this was the case as well. Which is worse: Overeating, or cheating on your spouse? Telling a lie, or raping and murdering someone?”
Carl Gallups, a Baptist minister, pastor, author and radio talk-show host, has also devoted much time to this issue in light of the Supreme Court’s June 26 ruling.
He believes the fact that homosexuality was not only practiced widely in ancient Canaan but that authorities apparently gave it their stamp of approval may well have been why God ordered the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanite society.
“Isn’t it interesting that one of the oldest known references to homosexual contracts sanctioned by a government and society references a society for which God ordered its total destruction? Not only that, but God gave the reason for its destruction as being ‘defiled’ and worthy of ‘vomiting out its inhabitants,'” said Gallups, author of “Final Warning: Understanding the Trumpet Days of Revelation.”