Newly Released Documents Outline ALEC’s Anti-Gay Agenda
Some of the documents uncovered by People For the American Way and the Center For Media and Democracy are almost three decades old — but they spell out ALEC’s virulently anti-gay agenda:
ALEC, whose corporate backers include Exxon and the Koch brothers, distributed a policy memo in 1985 — “Homosexuals: Just Another Minority Group” — to its public sector members, calling gay people pedophiles and a major “health risk.”
ALEC spokesman Bill Meierling told The Huffington Post earlier this week in an email that the memo’s release is disappointing and misrepresentative. Currently, “ALEC maintains no model policy on social issues … ALEC welcomes discourse as well as the views of all people, and is interested in both diversity generally as well as diversity of opinion,” Meierling said.
The 1985 memo argues that the “homosexual movement has had an impact too great and far reaching for Americans to ignore,” mocking the community’s “ultimate goal” of “acceptance” while bemoaning gay-rights progress. It opposes the “overall agenda” of the gay community, including legal rights to protection from physical assault, incarceration or housing, and employment discrimination for being gay.
ALEC’s monthly newsletters at the time — in addition to the policy memo — in addition to the policy memo — “tracked local, state and federal legislation and provided its members with ‘research’ to help them prevent advances in gay rights,” according to PFAW.
Gay people make a “conscious choice” to be gay, says the memo, citing “expert” psychotherapists to claim that homosexuality can be willed away.
“The homosexual also believes that homosexuality is unchangeable, but an integral part of his or her person. Many experts, however, including two psychotherapists … state otherwise,” it asserts. “Out of seventy-two homosexual patients, 38% had become heterosexuals or bisexuals (19% each) and 27% had shifted from homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality.”
Unfortunately for ALEC, there’s this thing called science, and it’s pretty much destroyed those assertions about gays.
You can read the entire, insanely bigoted ALEC memo via PFAW here.
