Why we keep fighting – a Memorial Day message

May 28, 2007

This past week the editor of a conservative website asked me why we in Massachusetts haven't given up. He mentioned the parade of "horror stories" we've been publishing. "When you look around, hasn't the other side pretty much completely won?" he said.

A lot of people have been asking that lately. A few nights earlier, I asked my father what he thought. We're going through a "culture war" now. But what about the real war that he went through? What was that like?

Sixty-five years ago, on Memorial Day of 1942, the Nazis had conquered most of Europe and had moved into Russia and North Africa. Since the Pearl Harbor attack the previous December, the Japanese Empire had rolled through the entire Pacific practically unimpeded. In April, thousands of American soldiers had died in the infamous Bataan Death March. American troops in the Philippines had surrendered on May 12, and on May 20 the Japanese captured Burma. The Allies were being defeated just about everywhere. The Axis powers appeared unstoppable and it seemed only a matter of time before they reached our shores. On Memorial Day of 1942 my dad was graduating from high school.

"What was it like?" I asked him. "Were people depressed? Were they scared? Did they feel defeated?"

"Oh, no." he said. "People weren't depressed. Everybody believed we would win."


That fall, my dad and most of his buddies joined the US Army. Some of them never made it back. Sixty-five years later my dad still remembers them every year.

This Memorial day, here in Massachusetts in 2007, the homosexual lobby dominates our State House, and is filing bills to push their agenda further than ever. They have homosexual clubs in high schools across the state. They use state money to bring kids downtown to mingle with adult cross-dressers and other hard-core activists. A federal judge ruled that schools can show picture books to elementary school children about homosexual romance. And our political leaders help raise money for their movement.

Sixty-five years from today, what will people remember about what you did to stop them? Will you dedicate yourself to this fight?

World War Two was won with guns and bullets and bombs. This war will be won with truth and fearlessness. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that we can and will prevail completely. Our adversary's movement has the illusion of indomitable strength, but it is really a house of cards, held up by threats and intimidation and a dysfunctional ideology. If you are willing to fight - to tell the truth and not be afraid - it will fall.

There is one difference from 1942. Today, one of the biggest obstacles in this battle is the mainstream conservative movement itself - our side. They value "dignity" and "polite behavior" over speaking the harsh and uncomfortable truth. They preach prayer as a way to avoid taking action. They seek to compromise as a way to avoid conflict. They talk about differences of opinion as a way to avoid facing good versus evil. It subverts our efforts and causes terrible results.

Did people in1942 talk about respecting the Nazis "choice" of political philosophy? Or that we ought to consider letting Japan have Korea and the Solomon Islands if they'd let us have the Philippines - because that's what the "experts" say we could work out?

Don't listen to them. It's a false promise. It's extremely tempting but it's the road to hell. That's why we support a Parents' Rights Bill that gives parents complete control. And it's why we don't support the current Constitutional Amendment that purposefully compromises by only banning future homosexual "marriages" and allowing all others - including civil unions or domestic partnership - to stand unimpeded. Compromising in normal discourse is often appropriate; but compromising with evil is disastrous.

Don't get discouraged. Don't get depressed. This fight isn't over.

- Brian Camenker


P.S. A week after Memorial Day of 1942 - on June 5 - the US won the Battle of Midway, the first decisive victory and the turning point in the war in the Pacific.