This “is the first time in at least half a century that a publicly funded university has directly poured money into the coffers of evil Catholic conversion therapists!” So said the ever-colorful Milo Yiannopoulos, sarcastically, at Penn State University on November 3 in a talk titled “Pray the Gay Away.”
It’s the first time in four years that “Milo,” as his fans would call him, has appeared on a college campus, and much has changed during his absence. Oh, he’s still on the “right”; still has bleached hair, at least partially; still is sharp as a whip with rapier wit; and still is controversial. But then there’s the difference: Yiannopoulos has “come out” — as straight.
It’s a striking transformation for the man who once said that while he considered homosexuality a choice, dispensing with his would destroy his career. But then Yiannopoulos announced, earlier this year, that he was “Ex-Gay” and “sodomy free.” He also stated that he was leading a daily consecration to St. Joseph online, saying that people can’t conquer sin via purely secular means; God’s grace is necessary. Now he has reportedly come full circle, going to confession and coming into full communion with the Catholic Church.
But just as striking as Yiannopoulos’s conversion, and his reversion, is what he stated in this article’s opening line: that in this “woke” time a publicly funded university financed a speech by a self-proclaimed “conversion therapy” proponent. This therapeutic — much maligned and even outlawed in many states by “tolerant” leftists (who don’t mind when adults facilitate boys’ purported conversion into girls) — aims to help homosexuals purge their same-sex attraction feelings and cultivate normal sexuality.
Yiannopoulos had already signaled his interest in this cause, telling LifeSite news in March, “Over the next decade, I would like to help rehabilitate what the media calls ‘conversion therapy.’ It does work, albeit not for everybody.”
Yet there’s something even more striking about Yiannopoulos’s Penn appearance. It was in 1989 already, in the book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s, that sexual devolutionary authors Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen called for a desensitization of Americans to homosexuality through a “continuous flood of gay-related advertising.” Speaking of conversion (another one the Left wholly endorses), they also called for a “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.”
Even more to the point, however, Kirk and Madsen predicted that in the future, those who “still feel compelled” to oppose homosexuality would be “cow[ed] and silence[d] … as far as possible”; the homosexuality activists further stated that if they can “produce a major realignment solidly in favour of gay rights, the intransigents (like the racists of twenty years ago) will eventually be effectively silenced by both law and polite society.”
This is largely a fait accompli. Homosexuality is now a third rail of American social commentary, generally untouched by prominent commentators, politicians, and even clergymen (see Joel Osteen et al.) no matter how “brave” they may be or think they are, for fear of career destruction. But “A fallacy doesn’t cease to be a fallacy because it becomes a fashion,” noted G.K. Chesterton, and Yiannopoulos is touching the topic; in fact, he’s ravaging it.
And the commentator has gotten a chance to do this not at Liberty University or California’s Thomas Aquinas College, but Penn State! To be clear, Penn didn’t invite Yiannopoulos; the student organization Uncensored America did. But the University Park Allocation Committee approved the event and had to provide funding for it, paying Yiannopoulos just under $18,000 for the talk.
There were, of course, protests, with assorted ne’er-do-well sexual devolutionaries rallying outside Penn’s Joab L. Thomas Building November 3, chanting “Penn State students, give them hell! It is right to rebel!” (Isn’t the actual rebel the guy going against pro-homosexual popular culture, pro-homosexual academia, and pro-homosexual media — the whole pro-homosexual establishment — and not those being applauded by it?)
Penn officials responded to the protester spirit even before Yiannopoulos’s appearance. “As a public university, we are fundamentally and unalterably obligated under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment to protect various expressive rights, even for those whose viewpoints offend our basic institutional values,” Vice President and General Counsel Steve Dunham, Vice President for Student Affairs Damon Sims, and Vice Provost for Educational Equity Marcus Whitehurst wrote in a statement, reported the Daily Collegian October 25.
“To do so [sic] otherwise not only violates the Constitution, but would undermine the basic freedom each of us shares to generally think and express ourselves as we wish,” the men continued.
But don’t give them too much credit. Dunham, Sims, and Whitehurst also “labeled Yiannopoulos as ‘offensive and hurtful,’ a ‘social provocateur’ with values ‘antithetical to Penn State’s’ that ‘deliberately create controversy, hurt and disruption,’ the Collegian further informed. They called on students to “take action through inaction” and to silence “hate mongers” by turning their backs on them.
But the sexual devolutionaries will find that you can’t turn your back on the Truth — not without consequences, anyway. Related to this, a questioner at Penn asked Yiannopoulos about conversion therapy, “What if it makes me straight? What am I going to do?”
“Well, get into Heaven,” the commentator responded unflinchingly.
For sure, these faux rebels may discover that beyond this material fold, the “establishment” is not on their side.
(Below is a news piece about Yiannopoulos’s appearance.)
