While the horror show involving Brendan Eich, Proposition 8, and Mozilla was reaching its ignominious crescendo, I was in Milan, Italy, speaking before an energized crowd of activists in the Lombardy region’s county hall.

Unaware of the witch hunt carried out by McCarthy’s rainbow-brandishing gay great-grandsons in Silicon Valley, a middle-aged man came forward and cried out in Italian, “Is it just me, or is the gay lobby imposing a dictatorship on us with their so-called scientific experts?”

The science to which he referred wasn’t JavaScript, but rather psychology and pediatrics.  He was referring to homosexual activists’ constant invocation of research supposedly proving that kids don’t need a mom and a dad, because scientists in lab coats with horrendous conflicts of interest publish peer-reviewed papers claiming that the statistics prove that children can be removed from a parent and still be “well-adjusted.”

I asked the audience: “Enough of gays saying they feel offended all the time.  How do they think I feel when they tell me, someone raised by lesbians, I don’t have a right to my father, because of experts and their supposed research?”  Applause, applause.  The clock struck 10:00 PM in Italy.

“They don’t want to be told whom to love.  So who are they to tell children who aren’t theirs that they have to love two gay adults and can’t love a biological parent the adults cut out of their lives?”

Eight time zones away, in California, conservatives were expressing their outrage over the ouster of a techie genius who did nothing but support a cause he believed in.

My phone pinged with an adrenaline-drenched e-mail from an American ally in the pro-family struggle.  The next Milanese questioner stepped forward to the microphone.  Oh, the ironies.

Europeans had brought me overseas – an alliance of Anglicans in England, human rights advocates in Belgium, and Catholics in Italy – because they viewed me, correctly or not, as one of very few people in the West still willing to fight publicly against the gay lobby.

Of course, I was delighted to come and speak to the BBC in London, to German parliamentarians in Brussels, and to Italian jurists, but one of the reasons that I was so available to help European allies was practical: having been blacklisted and driven out of the public square by a cadre of unhinged homosexual fascists, I could make no appearances in the United States and had, up until last month, a wide open schedule.

Between March 2013 and April 2014, I made four trips to Europe and delivered dozens of interviews, public addresses, and presentations, with everyone from I-Télé to church groups to European members of parliament.

Meanwhile, I was largely invisible in the United States.  Conservatives who wanted to defend marriage focused on buttoned up academic postulations, religious-freedom arguments like the ones championed with vetoed legislation in Arizona, and warnings about a slippery slope leading to polygamy.  I had chosen an urgent and stark tone in my argumentation, naming same-sex parenting as child abuse, invoking past history when social experimentation led to atrocities, and rejecting sentimentality in favor of probing scrutiny.

There was still a belief among many defenders of marriage that compassion, civility, and professionalism could overwhelm the gay lobby with kindness.

The result was that troublemakers like me were banished to Europe.  Spineless conservatives started “evolving” to the other side in droves, and the gay lobby’s shills opened fire on the Family Research Council’s Washington offices, eviscerated the careers of performers like Michelle Shocked and Rupert Everett, and became the party of full-fledged Orwellian totalitarianism.

You know that popular line from the Letter to the Romans: “if your enemy is hungry, feed him”?  Don’t forget the follow-up: “You will pour burning coals on his head.”  When you see a movement as unprincipled and ruthless as the gay lobby is, you must be clear that you have an enemy.  The gay lobby is not your friend.  Any friendliness from them is likely manipulation and subterfuge.  Remember: your end goal is to pour burning coals on his head, not to have tea and crumpets and reminisce about the good old days when you were classmates at Dartmouth.  When they invite you to dinner with the kids they conceived with a surrogate, they are trying to brainwash you, as they’ve already brainwashed the kids.  Remember that.

While I appreciate tremendously the willingness of American Thinker and Public Discourse to give me a venue, the truth is, many conservatives, even the ones fighting gay marriage, have viewed me as a liability and cooperated with the blackout.  Other right-wing journals wouldn’t publish me.  For a year and a half I got many queries from college students interested in having me speak, but conservatives sponsoring them deemed me too controversial.  (Due to the courage of Notre Dame’s Students for Child-Oriented Policy and Stanford’s Anscombe Society, my blackout streak was finally broken; I was able to deliver a speech at Notre Dame on April 3 and another at Stanford on April 5.)

After I testified in Minnesota in February 2013, gay groups went into hysterics over my observation that buying babies was illegal in a society that had abolished slavery.  Behind the scenes, I received a steady flow of worried e-mails from conservative family advocates (“You’re going too far! You can’t compare slavers to gay dads like my dear friends who have three surrogate children by five egg-donating and womb-renting breeders!”), which precipitated radio silence.

Why did the situation get so bad that Brendan Eich could be the victim of character assassination on such a shameless scale?  Is it because the gay lobby is that evil?  Yes, of course, the gay lobby has succeeded because its leaders have been willing to employ every kind of wickedness simultaneously: lying, manipulating, betraying, playing the victim, using human shields, accusing, intimidating, buying friends, and destroying enemies.

But that’s not news.  In all honesty, I think that the gay lobby’s fascism has reached this tipping point not because of the gay lobby per se – the real problem has been, all along, that conservatives have never been willing to fight back.

Gay parenting is built on sheer adult selfishness, but too many conservatives are scared of saying so because they have family members and colleagues they don’t want to offend.  It wouldn’t be so bad if they chose to live in silence but at least supported those of us who are willing to call people out for doing things that are wrong.  Yet when I say things like this, conservatives get scared; the radio silence deepens, and I end up in Europe again.

Europe is another world entirely.  The French fill the streets and fight gay adoption – not because they are arguing for more civil discourse, but rather because kids have a right to a mom and a dad, and it is urgent to fight people who violate that right.  They invoke the history of slavery when they see people who want to import children conceived by Indian surrogates.  They compare lesbians engaging in sperm-banking and genetic design schemes to Nazi eugenicists, because the parallel is obvious.  They refer to homosexual adoption as child abuse and remind people that it’s cultural genocide and a violation of international law to use children to engage in social experiments that will alienate them from the civic traditions of their biological parents.

There is compassion in what these activists say, of course, just as there is in what I say.  Our issue is not with gay people, as we’ve said over and over again; we give forums and backing to homosexuals and bisexuals who join us in protesting the gay lobby’s abhorrent abuse of women and children.  We just don’t waste half our public speeches apologizing or delivering “the lady doth protest too much” disclaimers that we aren’t homophobes.

And so what if someone does have an inner dislike of homosexuality?  Other things are more important; other people’s dignity is at stake.  If I have to choose between homophobes who will protect children’s rights to a mother and father and pro-gay advocates who think homosexuals have a right to take kids from other people, guess what: I’ll work with the homophobes.

I can’t say I understand fully why conservatives have been so defensive and small in the way they engage the gay lobby.  All during 2012 and 2013, there were signs that the gay movement – never to be conflated with gay people themselves – had become an engine of world-historical evil.  These are people who are comfortable outing other homosexuals, humiliating gay people who transition out of the lifestyle (even if they have been abused), gunning down nonprofit offices, and closing orphanages to force adoption agencies to set aside quotas of abandoned children for gay homes.  They compare people who support marriage to the KKK, slave-owners, Nazis, and Bull Connor on a regular basis.  They harass and torment people who have gay parents if they don’t sing utopian paeans to the joys of same-sex parenting.

As Brendan Eich is brought down by the terrible hand of fascism, it is time for people who feel outraged by it to move beyond crying over the fallout of a supposedly lost battle for marriage.  It’s time to get off the defensive.  It’s time to fight for marriage and children’s rights.  Eich’s ouster was pushed by a political gay lobby that lost its principles after years of arguing for something unjust and indefensible – the transformation of children into uprooted property designed to meet the emotional demands of adults.  If we do not defend marriage as the institution that exists to safeguard against such objectification of children, we are doomed merely to manage the fallout of our own weakness.  We will be begging to be left alone, and our begging will not work, because we will have surrendered what really mattered in the first place: justice for the vulnerable.  Having failed to speak for those too young to speak for themselves, we will reap the punishment of having nobody to speak for us when the great beast comes to devour us next.

Stop crying.  Get moving already.

Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, and Michigan have still not finalized gay marriage.  The cases are still pending.  Whatever happens with those cases, there are midterm elections coming up.  Make candidates know that we aren’t buying the gay marriage swindle.  There are countless nations overseas that have not legalized gay marriage yet.  And even if gay marriage goes worldwide, we can still rally to pass a constitutional amendment or global resolutions affirming the inalienable right of a child to his mother and father wherever possible.

Instead of crying over the predictable misdeeds of a lobby that has revealed itself for all its evil, we need to fight.  Fight to win.  Fight gay marriage, because the gay lobby chose to yoke marriage to a “right to have a child.”  Fight gay adoption, because the gay “right to have a child” means that children become objects, and adults become slave-owners again.  Stop worrying about your gay neighbor, getting a regular spot on the radio, being accepted, distinguishing yourself from the supposed bigots (the folks who are really doing all your fighting for you).  Fight, for God’s sake.  Fight.

Robert Oscar Lopez edits English Manif.