It started, as so many human rights disasters do, in the name of love.  It was commonplace in the antebellum Americas to hear of plantation owners expressing love for their slaves.  Even Frederick Douglass admits that many times slaves, while alone, vied to see who could praise his master the highest.  Did not Robespierre begin with love for his countrymen?  For that matter, didn't Castro?

History repeats. The movement to liberate same-sex love began because people loved each other.  Somehow, through convoluted digressions, it has become a tyrannical octopus seeking to control life and death itself.

The Rubicon was crossed when the gay movement sided with human trafficking; graft-ridden dirty deals with warlords for orphanages; bio-engineering, baby-farming, and emotional deprivation of innocent children by forcing them to replace a biological parent with a fictional same-sex partner.  Naturally, any child forced into such a psychically traumatic origin fantasy who feels resentful about it will be cursed by its caretakers as not only ungrateful, but also a homophobe.

A year ago, I was afraid to fight what is happening in the LGBT community.  Unaware of  what the response would be, I published some articles about being the product of gay parenting and received hundreds of e-mails from around the world pleading with me to fight against a growing human-rights crisis caused by the LGBT movement.  They wrote from so many places, so many countries; they had such eloquence and force; they were children of sperm donors, troubled adoptees, people agonized by the baby-farming in India and elsewhere, gays horrified at what is being done in the name of "gay families," religious people, atheists, people who know for whatever reason that buying babies and erasing fatherhood or motherhood is not the fruit of love.

I cannot stay silent anymore.  My race forbids it; perhaps, being the descendant of Puerto Rican slaves and knowing that the LGBT movement is reducing people -- children, sperm donors, surrogate mothers -- to chattel.  I have assembled a document listing the main points of urgency.  I fear that the only movement that can take action would have to be global; in the United States, as I explain, the academy, the fourth estate, the democratic process, and the judiciary are all ill-equipped to stop what the LGBT movement is doing.

It didn't have to happen this way.  As a child, I lived in a gay community that was still struggling and embattled.  My mother, a lesbian, was a survivor of tremendous repression and taught me to be a survivor, too.  It ended up that we were a gay household when nobody had a name for that.  If Wordsworth is right and the child is the father of the man, then I was molded as a sexual outsider looking in, gazing from a jealous fringe upon a world full of people who had the luxury to take their mannerisms and interactions for granted.

As a teenager, I remember when AIDs came.  To see people you love wither alone, forgotten, staving off death while also still crippled by stigmas -- such moments teach you the importance of love in social change.

But then a funny thing happened to the gay world.  Love started to give way to hate.  There was a poignancy and grace about surviving in the earlier days of gay history.  By the late 1990s, an overfunded and politically connected elite had taken over gay rhetoric, claiming to speak in the name of everyone who had ever felt a forbidden love.  The elite stentorian agitators didn't have elegance.  They hit people over the head.  They rounded up heaps of money, hobnobbed with celebrities and well-heeled politicians, and started spending too much time at galas to have any sense that they were becoming, to put it bluntly, disgusting.

Suicides committed by teenage boys they'd never otherwise deign to speak to, let alone think of, became martyrdoms to be brandished like sacrificial goats.  Then there was a reign of terror about sexual categories, which still persists: people who leave the gay lifestyle, people who had homosexual pasts but don't wear them on their sleeve, people who want to have a choice about how to identify or at least allow choices to others, were all suddenly the enemy. 

I saw the loving part drift off, the anima of a living soul being gently carried away like a cloud of mist, leaving only the animus behind.  I'd have to blink and remind myself I was simply looking at Hillary Rosen or Rachel Maddow. 

What is the slogan that I speak of with greatest horror?  "I deserve the same rights as anyone else."  That might be a harmless slogan, except not when the "right" you are referring to is the right to "build a family" to show that "you are capable of love." 

"I deserve the same rights" eventually means that a same-sex couple deserves to have a child provided to them, even though they can't conceive it themselves.

If straight couples get to have undiluted custody of such a child, so should gay couples.  So they must have the "right" to enforce contracts preventing surrogate mothers from wanting their babies back, the "right" to have sperm banks operate and sell them sperm, the "right" to jump the queue in line for Catholic Charities, the "right" to farm babies in the third world, the "right" to extort gratitude from the children they've placed in these situations, and the "right" to blind a child to at least one of his or her biological parents.  If any of these "rights" is not held up with the full force of a state apparatus, then the slogan fails.  Hence, we see the case of Dred Scott revived.  To be treated as first-class citizens, gays need the government to cow their chattel into submission.

Underneath the appeals to "love" lies a morass of brutally gory market mechanisms, approaching science fiction.  The changes in gay culture have created a large pool of same-sex couples who not only want children without involving themselves with the opposite sex, but also feel that any qualms are banned forms of hate speech.  Meanwhile, a recent Gallup poll found that each generation of Americans is becoming gayer: now, over 6% of citizens under the age of 29 identify as LGBT.  As recently as three years ago, polling consistently found LGBTs to make up less than 2% of the population.

The fight for marriage has never been about marriage.  Marriage is the only way to have legal cover and shield themselves from criticism for their bioethical stunts.

Market demand is a powerful thing, and it is growing because of the increase in LGBT couples as well as the cultural messages convincing young gays that they will be given children or else society is oppressing them.  Here in Los Angeles, I've seen the eerie proliferation of designer babies in gayborhoods, and the increasingly anesthetized reaction of gay couples' friends.  People go to third-world getaways to pick out babies, place ads for surrogates who can give them a certain eye color, and even collaborate with human trafficking.  Never forgetful of my own pains as a lesbian's son in the 1970s, I see the faces of these gay couple's children, and sometimes, I have to run away and cry.  I know the dazed glare, the powerlessness of these children, their helpless desire to please their parents, their fear of showing their parents any sign that the arrangement has been hurtful. 

And yet, I can scarcely forget, this is only the beginning.  While some say "it gets better," all signs show that it will grow far worse.  LGBT activists have been frustrated so far by the largest Western nations' resistance to legalizing gay marriage.  In this table, a Francophone researcher discusses the gay-marriage statistics from Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Quebec.  Remember that France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, the more populous nations of Europe, have still resisted full marriage equality.  Already in tiny Belgium, 5% of marriages are same-sex.  What will happen with the combined populations of Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States -- 570 million people in all -- legalize gay marriage, with 5% of that mass being same-sex couples looking to buy babies?

We are staring into the dawn of a new slave trade.  Rather than let the Middle Passage happen and then spend centuries trying to exonerate our nation, we must be "on the right side of history."  Stop gay marriage -- not because of hate for gay people, but because the machine that is turning people into chattel must be stopped.  The only way to break the cycle and wake everyone up is stop gay marriage.

Robert Oscar Lopez is the author of Johnson Park.