Ever since the French Revolution, it has been an axiom of the political left that the state has the vocation, not just to protect freedom, security and private property, but to create freedom, security and private property.

The guru of revolutionary politics, Jean Jacques Rousseau, (pictured above) observed that, "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying `This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society." And lest anyone mistake his meaning, Rousseau believed civil society was bad, as was the private property it existed to preserve.

Rousseau's antipathy to private property was matched only by his insistence that everything belonged collectively to the state. As he put it in his book The Social Contract, "Every member of the community gives himself to it at the moment it is brought into being just as he is - he himself, with all his recourses, including all his goods." (Click here to read more quotes from The Social Contract)

According to the revolutionary model inspired by Rousseau - all things belong to the state by default, and that which we can call our own is merely that which the state, like a good mother, has graciously allowed us to enjoy for a time. Since the only true ownership is collective rather than private, and since that collective is mediated through the "General Will" of the state, political systems that are based on this model see no problem redistributing wealth and plundering the earnings of their citizens, all in the name of freedom. (See Peter Hitchens on the difference between the conservative and liberal view of Liberty)

LIFE: A GIFT FROM THE STATE?

But there is a more sinister side to the revolutionary model. Not only is property and freedom a gift from the state, to be used and enjoyed conditionally, but so is life itself. Again Rousseau couldn't have stated the matter with more clarity: "life is.a gift he has received conditionally from the state." (The Social Contract, chapter 5)

To see the outworking of Rousseau's idea, we could go to the French Revolution. But we could also look closer to home. The revolution's contemporary heirs, no less than the champions of the guillotine, have realized the implications of a philosophy which asserts that life is a gift received conditionally by the state. Indeed, the contemporary eugenics movement, pioneered by the political left in the 20th century, but then hushed up after Hitler gave social engineering a bad name, was based on just such a principle. Though liberals no longer advocate forced sterilization and the incarceration of the 'feeble minded', they do still hold to the underlying political ideology: the state is the author of life and liberty and therefore has an unqualified authority over it. (I have already noted a similar principle in relation to health, warning that a government which takes responsibility over health will soon be a government assuming authority over health.)

Decreasing the Surplus Population

Of course, a state that has unqualified authority over life is a state that has no scruples reducing the quantity of life in order to increase the quality of life (for those who are left). Though this sounds like something from the Gulags or Nazi Germany, it is actually the operating assumption behind those political and financial gurus who have recently been calling for a massive decrease in the "surplus population." Consider that:

• In an interview with the New York Times, Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg alluded to the fact that abortion is all about getting rid of certain types of people that we do not want around: "Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of.
• Echoing comments made by the Optimum Population Trust in 2007, The London School of Economics recently suggested that the best way to combat global warming is to reduce the surplus population through contraception and abortion. (Their logic is simple: more people = more polluters.) Similarly, a 2007 report, written by specialist Professor Barry Walters for the Australian medical journal, calls for couples with more than two children to be charged a lifelong tax to offset their extra offspring's carbon dioxide emissions. Parents to be charged $5000 a head for every child after their second, and an annual tax of up to $800. (See Steve Watson's article 'Elite Depopulation Agenda Gains Ground')
• In its autumn 2009 edition (Issue 10), Salvo magazine reported that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has come up with a new way to reduce poverty: reduce poor people. The campaign, which has been supported by Bill Gates, does so by supporting and funding coercive sterilization, contraception and abortion campaigns. (See Stephen Moore's article Don't Fund UNFPA Population Control). In this regard, it should not be overlooked that many have warned that 'Agenda 21' of the United Nations Division For Sustainable Development also has population control implications.
• In a 1981 interview which is quoted here, Thomas Ferguson of the State Department Office of Population Affairssaid "we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it.."
• Population control seems to be the pet topic among those men who control much of the world's wealth. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Ted Turner have all spoken publically in favour of drastically reducing the human species, and supported programs designed to eliminate the excess in babies. For example, in 1996, Ted Turner stated that, "A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal." (See Ted Turner Wants You Dead To Save The Planet)
• College professors and leaders frequently cite the Georgia Guidestones to in arguing that that we should "maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature." To achieve that, the human population would have to be thinned by 90%.
• The Anglo-Dutch financial empire has been and still is committed to reducing the world's population from the present 6.7 billion, to under 2 billion persons. As Laurence Hecht reminds us, this has been stated repeatedly in the post-war period by such leading spokesmen as Lord Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, and World Wildlife Fund founders Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and the still-living Prince Philip, who has reiterated many times his desire to see the human population thinned.
• Robert McNamara of the World Bank has said, "Excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the developing world."
• Initiative for the United Nations ECO-92 Earth Charter reads, "The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary."
• Dr. Henry Kissinger has said "World population needs to be decreased by 50%."
• Friends of the Earth founder, David Brower, has stated, "That's the first thing to do, start controlling the population in affluent white America, where a child born to a white American will use about fifty times the resources of a child born in the black ghetto." "Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license.... All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing." (Taken from Population Control...Just a Conspiracy Theory, Right?)
• President Obama's top science and technology advisor, John P. Holdren, has advocated the possibility of a "planetary regime" that would use a "global police force" to enforce totalitarian measures of population control, including forced abortions, mass sterilization programs conducted via the food and water supply, as well as mandatory bodily implants that would prevent couples from having children.

The underlining premise behind all of the above is the same premise that undergirded the 20th century eugenics movement, namely the idea that irresponsible individualism in breeding is a cancer on the human population, harming posterity. Government, not God, holds the future of the human race in its reigns and can save us, quite literally, by strategic intervention designed at reducing the surplus population. Building on Rousseau's idea that life, liberty and property are given to us by the state for the sake (not of the individual) but of the general will of the whole, it is no small step to believe that these privileges can be revoked as soon as too much life threatens the health of the collective.

Population Control By Stealth

When you have a team with as much money and power as John Holdren,, the Optimum Population Trust, The London School of Economics, the United Nations, the State Department, the Anglo-Dutch financial empire, the World Bank, Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Prince Phillip and many others all put together, who have the stated objective of significantly reducing the human population, you have to ask, "How do they intend to do it?"

The traditional methods of cultural sterilization (encouraging abortion, birth control, and negative attitudes toward children) are simply not getting the job done, as the world's population is continuing to grow, rather than shrink as these individuals would like. Christians, in particular, are producing more children than 30 years ago, creating a demographic trend that has the liberal elite running scared. Neither can they rely on plagues to accomplish the task, because the human race is simply not as vulnerable to plagues as they were in past centuries, thanks to sanitation, insect control, and fresh vegetables to eat all winter. While there are viruses like ebola and bird flu that are highly virulent, they are not very infectious, while the viruses that are highly infectious, like the common cold and regular flu, are not very virulent and kill less than 1%. There have been no viruses for a long time that both highly infectious and highly virulent.

Similarly, they cannot rely on war to accomplish the task. "War has hitherto been disappointing" in its capacity to reduce the world's population, "but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective," Lord Bertrand Russell proposed in 1953, savoring the benefits of spreading "a Black Death . . . throughout the world once in every generation."

So the only way to eliminate 90% of the world population is to either inject them with a deadly disease, or toxin, or to inject them with a sterilizing agent. But this would be highly unpopular. The general population no longer favours direct population control measures as it once did. Although those with money and power would like to see a decrease in the 'surplus population,' there are very few who would respond favourably to the Malthusian measures that Obama's science advisor has suggested may be necessary and which China has been enforcing.

This means that population control will have to be enforced, not by a direct policy, but by stealth.

The H1N1 Vaccine

 It may be that this is already happening so close to home that few have yet to recognize it. Even as I write this article, I believe a serious attempt is being made to introduce population control through the back door, in the form of the H1N1 Swine Flu Vaccine.

Consider that Dr. Richard A. Fayrer-Hosken at the University of Georgia, invented a vaccine similar to the swine flu vaccine with the expressed purpose of impairing fertility. Administered by a simply shot, the result is a lifetime of sterility. It has been found to be effective on all the mammals on which it has been tested. According to information from the patent, which is publically available HERE, the active ingredients of this sterilization vaccine are primarily antigens from porcine (pig) glyco-proteins bonded with a powerful oil-in-water "adjuvant" called squalene. The squalene is emulsified in Tween 80 for an adjuvant.

In his article 'Immunosterilization in Humans: A 2009 Vaccination Odyssey', A. True Ott, PhD, ND, draws our attention to the fact that Novartis' master patent for the "swine flu" vaccine (which is also publically available HERE) similarly utilizes swine (porcine) glycol-proteins bonded with a powerful oil-in-water "adjuvant" called squalene. According to Novartis' parent, the Squalene in the vaccine is emulsified in Tween 80 for an adjuvant, as it also is in the sterilization vaccine.

The chemical similarity between the swine flu vaccine and Dr. Fayrer-Hosken's sterilization vaccine is too similar to dismiss as mere coincidence. The combination of these proteins can activate the human immune system to produce antigens or anti-bodies corresponding to the protein peptides, or polypeptides. These antibodies in turn will seek and destroy the naturally-occurring similar proteins or peptides which can be either the swine flu virus or human reproductive hormones. As was warned HERE, by injecting squalene/Tween 80 polysorbate into the human body, the swine-flu vaccine could trigger the human immune system to generate antibodies which will destroy hormonal peptides of the human host. The end result is infertility in male or female human body.

It cannot be mere coincidence that section 8.1 of the product information circular on the Novartis' "swine flu" vaccine contains this warning: "Animal reproduction studies have not been conducted with this -[vaccine]. It is also not known whether the vaccine can cause foetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman, or can affect reproduction capacity." (Emphasis added)

Moreover, Paul Fassa reminds us that the vaccine manufacturers are now legally exempt from any liability because the World Health Organization has declared a level 6 pandemic.

I am not making any dogmatic claims, but I do think we need to start asking certain questions, not least because there has historically been a link between vaccinations and sterilization. Let's not forget that in the early 1990s, the World Health Organization, working under the control of the UN, vaccinated thousands of girls in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines for tetanus, while knowingingly including within the vaccine ingredients that had been designed to produce lifetime sterility. (For more information about that, read my article The 1990s Tetanus Scandal.)

 Conclusion

 In short, there may be looming on our horizon a threat more dangerous than all the proposals of Robert Malthus and Francis Galton put together, but which few have yet to recognize since it is wrapped in the package of life preservation rather than life destruction.

If the media continues to whip everyone into a state of hysteria over the swine flu, it may be that the government will put measures in place to try to force school children to have the vaccine. I have already warned that under the auspice of 'national emergency,' the swine flu could be used as a Trojan horse for totalitarian measures. I gave that warning before learning that the legislative framework is already in place to allow the American government to intervene in judicial and civilian law enforcement activities if they believe there is an 'emergency.' (This does not merely apply to America. In June 2009, the World Health Organization declared a Level 6 Pandemic, which effectively gives the WHO a degree of dominion over the entire world.)

The media will continue to use the idea of 'emergency' to scare parents into getting their children vaccinated. As Adam Murdock, MD pointed out in his well-researched article 'The Threat of Mandatory Vaccinations,' we will continue to hear the refrain:

The H1N1 'swine' flu is an extraordinarily deadly virus.

You need to get the vaccine or you could suffer the consequences.

 

So-and-so has died in your neighbourhood. Do you want to be next?

 

When you hear that refrain, the best thing you can do is not to listen to the music. Instead, warn your friends and neighbours and church members not to listen. It is not the voice of those who are concerned for our safety. It is the voice of Rousseau. The last time a society listened to his voice, it echoed back in the French Revolution. Now that Rousseau's political philosophy has become the unquestioned orthodoxy among the liberal establishment, it may be echoing back, not with the guillotine, but with the swine flu vaccine.

Footnote: What the Doctors are Saying

The following warnings against vaccines and the sources which follow it are taken from Paul Fassa's well documented article 'Watch Out for Flying Syringes, GMO Food Vaccines, and Forced Vaccinations'. The sources are all from reputable doctors. My point in quoting these testimonies is not to prove that vaccines are bad (an equal number of testimony could be produced on the other side of the argument), but to answer those who allege that it is only whackos who question the ethics of vaccinations.

Neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, MD, author of Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills among other books, suggests that a single vaccine can cause brain damage for two years and five vaccinations would massively increase the risk of Alzheimer's Disease.

Dr. Len Horowitz, a most thorough medical investigator states, "Casually substituting vaccination for immunization mystifies the masses. Immunization is not man-made toxin-injection. It is the natural body-guarding response to foreign proteins and germs, the most lethal of which have been transmitted to humanity through contaminated vaccines and blood supplies."

Dr. James R. Shannon, former director of the National institute of health declared, ". . . the only safe vaccine is one that is never used."

In his article Why You Should Avoid Taking Vaccines, Dr. James Howenstine, MD, cites an episode where a Dr. W. Torch was able to document 12 deaths in infants which appeared within 19 hours of a DPT immunization. Then he studied 70 cases of SIDS. Two thirds of these victims had been vaccinated from one half day to 3 weeks prior to their deaths. None were attributed to vaccines by the medical establishment or the mass media.

From Dr. Boyd Haley, professor and chair, Department of Chemistry, University of Kentucky: "A single vaccine given to a six pound newborn is the equivalent of giving a 180 pound adult 30 vaccinations on the same day." "You couldn't construct a study to show that thimerosal (mercury in vaccines) is safe. It's just too damn toxic".

From a website promotion for a DVD entitled Shoot 'Em Up the Documentary, comes this information. "Did you know that we give children 23 viruses before they reach the age of 5? Did you know autism skyrocketed after the addition of more vaccines on the mandatory schedule and did you know that these vaccines contain thimerosal, which is ethyl mercury?" By the way, mercury is considered more toxic than lead and second in toxicity only to uranium.

Most vaccines are cocktails of pathogens from cultures derived from aborted fetuses or animal tissues. Thimerersol or ethyl mercury is not the only additive or preservative. Dr. Rima E. Laibow, MD, lists the ingredients common to vaccines, with some of her own comments, including, "If children receive all recommended vaccines, they will receive many times the supposed 'allowable safe limit' for mercury in the first two years of life.

Additional ingredients include antibiotics, aluminum gels, formaldehyde, monosodium glutamate (MSG), aluminum "which when combined with silicon deficiency and fluoride, results in the neurofibrillary tangles seen in Alzheimers disease, formaldehyde, MSG," a potent neurological excitotoxin which, like aspartame, can cause seizures, brain tumors, etc.

Dr. Rima goes on: "Squalene, a response enhancer or adjuvant, is present in many modern vaccines and is highly irritating to the immune system. . . . (used in) Anthrax vaccine in Gulf War I soldiers is believed by many to be a primary cause, along with depleted uranium, of the devastating condition known as Gulf War Syndrome".

An investigative journalist, Joe Vaills, now deceased, did a report on his website that disclosed a simple observation. The French troops from Gulf War I did not experience Gulf War Syndrome, and they were the only ones who did not receive Anthrax vaccinations!

What if the toxic materials are removed from vaccines? Many health experts point out the problem with bypassing the body's immune system by injecting antibodies. Dr. Rebecca Carley, MD explains, "All mammals . . . contain secretory IgA, an antibody which initiates the natural God-given immune response within the respiratory tract mucosa. Bypassing this mucosal aspect of the immune system by directly injecting organisms into the bloodstream leads to a corruption in the immune system itself."

Dr. Vernon Coleman says, "My own view is that vaccinations are unsafe and worthless."

Dr. Robert W. Simpson, of Rutgers University, warned that "immunization programs against flu, measles, mumps and polio may actually be seeding humans with RNA to form provirus's which will then become latent cells throughout the body ... they can then become activated as a variety of diseases including lupus, cancer, rheumatism and arthritis."

Dr. Viera Scheibner concluded that "there is no evidence whatsoever of the ability of vaccines to prevent any diseases. To the contrary, there is a great wealth of evidence that they cause serious side effects."

Jonas and Darrell Salk warned in Science magazine of March 4, 1977 that "Live virus vaccines against influenza or poliomyelitis may in each instance produce the disease it intended to prevent, (and) the live virus against measles and mumps may produce such side effects as encephalitis (brain damage)."

The old American tradition of redistribution

"Both health care providers and the commonweal now have a vested interest in certain forms of behavior, previously considered a person's private business, if the behavior impairs a person's 'health.' Certain failures of self-care have become, in a sense, crimes against society, because society has to pay for their consequences."

The SPLC can also boast for being one of the nation’s top fund-raising machines. Between 2000 and 2003, SPLC contributions and interest totalled more than $127,000,000.

In recent years the SPLC has lost its focus, having run out of legitimate racist threats with which to scare their donor base into contributing. Indeed, FBI data that was collected by state and local law-enforcement agencies show a dramatic decrease in the number of hate crimes. In 1995, hate crimes totaled 7,974. In 2007, 12 years later, that number dropped by 4%, despite the fact that the US population rose 16% during that period.

While hate crimes are waning, at least according to the FBI, the SPLC tells a different story. Indeed, according to the SPLC’s latest Intelligence Report, there has been more than a 50% increase since 2000.

The law centre has supplemented the decline in actual hate groups by targeting Christian organizations and labelling them as such.

A NEW KIND OF “HATE GROUP”

For the last two years, Abiding Truth Ministries, has been included in the SPLC’s annual list of “hate groups.” When asked by reporters why a pro-family Christian ministry would be classed as a “hate group” alongside neo-Nazi organizations, spokesmen for the SPLC answered that it is because the President of Abiding Truth Ministries, Dr. Scott Lively, is also the co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. This book is a well researched and factual analysis of the relationship between homosexuality and German fascism.

Working on the assumption that public disapproval of homosexuality leads inescapably to violence against homosexuals, the SPLC has been steadily adding other Christian ministries to their blacklist, including American Vision, the Chalcedon Foundation, Watchmen on the Walls, to name a few. In their criticisms of such ministries, it is not uncommon for the centre to make inflammatory and factual inaccurate claims, without any evidence or documentation.

Mimicking the smear campaigns that the pro-homosexual media has been waging against conservative Christians, the SPLC has also targeted specific individuals. For example, they went after Chief Justice Roy Moore because he refused to remove the Ten Commandment monument from the court house in Montgomery, Alabama. They have also criticized Pastor Douglas Wilson, a popular Christian speaker and writer on family issues, who has made no secret of his opposition to homosexual practice.

In their criticism of such individuals and groups, it is rare for the SPLC to give documented evidence to support their claims, relying instead on the power of emotion and false associations. For example, when Satender Singh was murdered in Sacramento, SPLC published an article linking the organization Watchmen on the Walls to the murder (the association was based on the fact that both the alleged perpetrator and the founder of Watchmen on the Walls are both Russian).

Even the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a highly respected forum of secular scholars promoting free market ideas in the Austrian tradition, met with the ire of the SPLC in summer 2003, when their Intelligence Report included it among “An array of right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.”

While the SPLC has been working over-time to portray the entire “Christian Right” as a network of dangerous “hate groups”, they have simultaneously attempted to preserve their status as an independent, non-partisan arbiter of the facts.SPLC thus forms a helpful case study for the tendency of American organizations known for tolerance to turn virulent in their attacks against Christians while still flying the banner of neutrality.

“Ultimately,” observed Gary DeMar, “the tactic is to strike fear in middle-America so the checks start rolling in. Most communities don’t see skinheads or even KKKers, but they do see D. James Kennedy on television, hear James Dobson on the radio, and listen to Gary DeMar at homeschool conventions. Hate has gone mainstream, the SPLC warns, so you better send a donation before these guys come and get you!...The SPLC is a fund raising industry designed to silence Christians. There’s not much money in fighting real hate groups now that only a few of the real haters are still around.”

DOUBLE STANDARD

While the SPLC purports to cover “hate” of all kinds, their website curiously omits any mention of the recent spate of hate-based attacks against Christians launched by the homosexual lobby in California.

In the vicious aftermath of Proposition 8 – a law that would prevent residents of California being forced to recognize same-sex marriage – homosexual blogs called for violence against Christians, some even issuing death threats and describing the types of weapons they would use in the murders. Many Christians received threats in the mail, while homosexual activists engaged in attacks specifically targeted against African Americans who voted overwhelmingly in favour of traditional marriage. Racist graffiti was found in the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray-painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.

Such racist attacks were conveniently overlooked by the SPLC, even though they claim on their website that “The SPLC legal department fights all forms of discrimination...”

The SPLC also conspicuously omitted to mention the occasion when furious homosexual rioters invaded a church service, flinging propaganda and condoms around the sanctuary and then engaging in sexual exhibitionism at the pulpit.

The SPLC is also failing to comment on the persecution against Christians which the homosexual lobby is perpetrating even as I write. Their latest stunt is to use public records to identify and then harass supporters of traditional marriage. Online maps have been made available which give the names and location of all who donated to the Prop. 8 campaign, leading to numerous Christians losing their jobs and having their businesses boycotted. For example, a hostess at a Los Angeles Mexican restaurant was targeted for her $100 contribution in support of the measure. She was forced out of her job. A Sacramento theatre director and the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival were also forced out of their jobs because of contributing to the Prop. 8 campaign. Fearing boycotts, many employers are now having to release staff who donated to the Prop. 8 campaign.

Being a pawn of the homosexual lobby, it is not surprising that the SPLC has been curiously silent in these cases where actual hate really does exist.

To top it all, when Mark Potok of the SPLC was asked about a series of arson attacks against 10 churches in Alabama, he told the Los Angeles Times that he didn’t “see any evidence that these fires are hate crimes. Anti-Christian crimes are exceedingly rare in the South.”

CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK

The SPLC’s smear campaign against Christian organizations isn’t just one more outbreak in the growing hostility against those who believe in the Bible. Nor is the problem merely that the SPLC has a double standard (i.e., imagining that disapproval of same-sex sex equals hate and violence against homosexuals, while turning a blind eye to the actual violence arising from the ‘gay’ community). The real concern should be that the SPLC are attempting to change how Americans think about homosexuality and homosexuals.

Changing the way we think has long been a concern of the homosexual lobby. In their book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s, Kirk and Madsen, themselves influential exponents of the homosexual rights movement, revealed their master plan for orienting Western consciousness in favour of the homosexuality agenda. They do not hesitate to call their strategy “unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising.” Just as Hitler sought to bring the Aryan race to power by first presenting it as the victims of European Jewry, so Kirk and Madsen sought to bring homosexuals to power by first presenting themselves as victims.

Elsewhere in the same book, Kirk and Madsen wrote, “We mean 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.” This propaganda hinged on orienting the public to view homosexuals as a victim minority – a project which the emergence of AIDS seemed to make possible. “As cynical as it may seem,” the authors explained, “AIDS gives us a chance, however brief, to establish ourselves as a victimized minority legitimately deserving of America’s special protection and care. At the same time, it generates mass hysteria of precisely the sort that has brought about public stonings and leper colonies since the Dark Ages and before….How can we maximize the sympathy and minimize the fear? How, given the horrid hand that AIDS has dealt us, can we best play it?”

The SPLC are carrying on the project begun by Kirk and Madsen in re-conditioning how Americans think of the homosexual agenda. By presenting the homosexual cause as a ‘civil rights’ issue in a long pedigree that has also included women suffrage and the black vote, the SPLC are creating the subtle impression that homosexuals are an oppressed class. By juxtaposing ministries like Abiding Truth Ministries and American Vision alongside the Ku Klux Klan and the White Aryan Resistance, they are contributing to the impression that a Biblical view of marriage is the moral equivalent to racism, with the corollary that homosexuals are a victimized minority legitimately deserving special legal protection.

When the “peat bog soldiers” were sent by the Nazi’s to work until they died, they took consolation in singing a song titled, “Die Gedanken sind frei” (“Thoughts Are Free”). The idea expressed in the title of this piece - that thought remains the outpost of human liberty – gave a measure of comfort to the prisoners who had been deprived of every other human freedom. At least they could defy their captors in this one remaining quarter: they still exercised control over their minds.

In his dysutopian classic 1984, George Orwell imagined a society in which even this final liberty had been taken away. Using omnipresent surveillance technology, Orwell’s thought police root out and punish those who engage in unapproved thinking.

For years, Orwell’s predictions seemed to bare little relevance to the free world of the West. While communist nations routinely used the Leninist notion of "false consciousness” to brainwash and control the minds of its citizens, the Western world has consistently stood as a hedge against such methods by putting a premium on intellectual freedom. As the oft-quoted maxim (falsely attributed to Voltaire) puts it, “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

In recent years, however, Western society has experienced a paradigm shift, as new legislation and jurisprudence has begun increasingly to focus not merely on actions, but also on thoughts. I first became aware of this tendency when Dr. N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, addressed the House of Lords on 9 February, 2006. In his address, the Bishop listed a number of recent cases, noting that “since the crimes in question have to do, not with actions but with ideas and beliefs, what we are seeing is thought crime.” He went on: “My Lords, I did not think I would see such a thing in this country in my lifetime…. The word for such a state of affairs is ‘tyranny’: sudden moral climate change, enforced by thought police.”

“Until recently, the law has been completely uninterested in penalizing motive. Whether one was driven to commit a crime by greed, malice, love, or hate was irrelevant. Only the conduct mattered. As far as the law was concerned, one could believe as he wished. He could like or dislike according to his whim. He could love or hate as he pleased.

Hate crime legislation changes all that. Now motive as well as conduct can be punished.”