Are you honored to read the words of a “rising star”?  According to the Human Rights Campaign’s September 15 report, “Export of Hate,” that’s me.  I’m apparently so famous and powerful that I rank second on their list of the most dangerous extremists launching homophobia from American soil.  I have supernatural powers that nobody could have guessed.  With no organizational affiliation, and nothing but a $65,000-a-year job with which I support a family of four in Los Angeles, I can make the whole world hate gays.

The Human Rights Campaign’s yearly revenues are estimated by some as over $10 million.  Their principals meet regularly with the president of the United States.  Yet they used up valuable donations to spy on and stalk me.  Because I’m really deadly like that.  I mean, I’m alive, I disagree with them, and I have a computer.  Call in the CIA!

Did I strap a suicide vest on?  Am I a terrorist?  Have I called for countries overseas to pass anti-sodomy laws?  Do I encourage people to hang gays?  Am I a promoter of ex-gay conversion therapy?  Do I call homosexuality an abomination or homosexuals bad people?

If you’ve read any of my work on American Thinker, you surely know that the answer to all those questions is no.

No, I do something far worse: I read a lot and speak seven languages.  Oh, and I have a passport and don’t die of stage fright when interviewed in front of large numbers of people.  These are the ingredients of a DEFCON-1 threat for the gay lobby.  A man of color who can read Aimé Césaire in the original French freaks them out a lot more than a man of color who runs off to join ISIS.

A few details: I have publicly supported civil unions.  I support foster care eligibility for gay couples, because foster care is not a permanent reassignment of parenthood.

Just in case you missed it, I am bisexual and don’t hide it or apologize for it.  And my mom was a lesbian.  But let’s not get into that.

Like an obsessive-compulsive one-note Charlie, my refrain has been, for years: children have an inalienable right to a mother and father, cannot be bought or sold, and are entitled to know their origins.  Whether it is straight people or gay people using divorce, surrogacy, trafficking, or any other means to deny people these rights, I oppose it.

This is a teachable moment because it reveals a great deal about what makes the Human Rights Campaign tick.  They’re after your kids, plain and simple; all their other issues are mere window dressing.

They have convinced themselves that gays are a tribe unto themselves, so their consuming goal is to populate the tribe so they don’t disappear.

Parenthood is their great white whale.  They want to have children to love them and call them Mom and Dad.  They need to get those children from you because biology prevents them from siring them naturally.  Gentlemen readers, these folks are trying to find a way to get the sperm out of your testicles and into their laboratories; lady readers, these folks need to find a way to implant an embryo of their sperm in your womb, keep you obedient during the gestation, and take your baby away forever.

The main item on the gay lobby’s agenda is patently insane.  People don’t generally want to let lesbians milk sperm out of their testicles.  People don’t usually like the idea of gay men gestating babies in their wombs and then taking them away.  (And no, “visitation” plans where these gamete donors get to see their progeny a few times a month are not a good arrangement; that stuff’s really creepy.)

And at least with me, these HRC lackeys cannot pull the old “are you saying my children are worth any less?” routine.  Just because you control a human being doesn’t mean that’s your child.  Even if someone is your child, criticizing you is not the same as insulting your child.  This is basic, but somehow the HRC manages to whitewash the complexities.  Despite all the choreographed photographs of happy gay couples with children, people generally do not like growing up and knowing that half of them was sold to a gay couple.

In America, a large segment of the population has been lulled into accepting same-sex parenting.  Virtually everywhere else, there are roadblocks, as there should be.  The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that gay marriage is not a human right.  The U.N. Human Rights Council recently voted to affirm the centrality of the family in international law, citing the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, whose seventh and ninth articles would seem to nullify any legal basis for same-sex parenting.

The people at HRC might be amazingly illiterate when it comes to geography, but all it takes is a decade or so of Americans talking to people in countries like Canada (where selling sperm and eggs is illegal) for the lapse in judgment to end and for people to wake up, saying, “Hey, this is really weird.”

I made four trips to Europe and visited the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, and France.  That’s it.  I never even did anything in Canada or Mexico.  If I had gone to those countries with a church to preach from Leviticus, nobody at HRC would care.

The four countries I visited have very little homophobia and a lot of public support for legislation protecting gays from discrimination.  (Also, anyone who goes to France knows that nobody exports ideas to France – they don’t like to be told what to believe.)  So it is a losing battle to play the pity card in such locales as a way to deflect attention from the fact that gays are stealing people’s DNA to engineer filial cyborgs.

But here is what drives HRC bonkers about my trips to those particular countries: these are places where there are sufficient barriers to commercial surrogacy so that gay couples from there have to fly to California to buy babies from paid breeders.  (HRC seems to want to keep secret that the international gay lobby has turned American women into incubation ovens, and instead of slaves originating in Africa, they now originate in Anaheim.)

That’s the other thing. Not only does the HRC explode into hysteria when they see me traveling to Paris and – gasp! – talking to people in French.  They also hate when I bring up history.  They love to compare themselves to black people.  Their comparisons are vaguely based on their sense that black people were enslaved and held captive, while gay teenagers didn’t get to go to a prom, and isn’t that all a similar kind of suffering?  I mean, isn’t the Middle Passage a lot like the pain of not having a bridal registry for two men at Nordstrom’s?

Cursed am I for having studied so much antebellum black literature.  I can’t help but point out that black suffering came from a practice of people buying people, and now, because they can’t procreate naturally, homosexuals are buying people and calling them their children.  I know, I know – we’re not talking about whips and chains or being forced to harvest sugarcane.  But is slavery minus atrociously painful labor no longer slavery?

Wasn’t slavery the problem with slavery, not all the horrors that sometimes accompany slavery and sometimes do not?  The thing itself – buying people like livestock and owning them, no matter how long the contract runs, whether you are a house or field servant – is the evil, not the byproducts.

Notice how I am not using profanity or saying that gay people are going to the fiery place below.  I am simply pointing out that the gay lobby is not the first orchestrated movement to rationalize buying people.  This is enough to turn them apoplectic.  It’s enough to land an obscure little nobody at a Cal State top billing in their paranoid fantasies.

It is common in France and Belgium for people to use the term esclavage, or slavery, in describing surrogacy arrangements.

I translated many such documents into English.  I am also an established scholar in early black literature, so I know quite a deal about what esclavage implied to people on both sides of the Atlantic.  I teach Samuel Sewall’s “The Selling of Joseph” to college students on a regular basis – the first full abolitionist text in English. It includes this crucial set of lines:

It is likewise most lamentable to think, how in taking Negros out of Africa, and Selling of them here, That which GOD ha's joyned together men do boldly rend asunder; Men from their Country, Husbands from their Wives, Parents from their Children. How horrible is the Uncleanness, Mortality, if not Murder, that the Ships are guilty of that bring great Crouds of these miserable Men, and Women.

I composed an article in French for some people in Europe, focusing on how Sewall’s overview of the violations of slavery spotlighted three separations as the main crime of the trade: men from their country, husbands from wives, parents from children.  Bingo.  That’s same-sex parenting.  The dirty ships are important, too, but it was not racism or hard labor that the abolitionists found abhorrent – it was the violation of natural bonds to family and ethnic origins.

If there is one charge that GLAAD and the HRC throw at me tirelessly, again and again, it’s the charge that I compared gay parents to slave owners.  Which I did.  In many languages.  In places where people get it.  Based on landmark texts that are sitting there for anybody to reference.

So my dear friends at HRC, there is no need to put me on notice.  I am guilty of the high crime of talking to people in other countries and sharing insights from world literature.  If you think I am going to stop or apologize, you haven’t researched me well enough.

According to some historians of the so-called killing fields, in the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge hunted down people with eyeglasses and killed them en masse.  They did this ostensibly because they worried that people who were too intelligent might challenge the draconian policies of the government.  Fortunately, the Human Rights Campaign has no killing fields, so I and my contact lenses are safe for now.  God grant that the awakening of reason come earlier rather than later.

Robert Oscar Lopez edits English Manif.

[* Editor's note: A previous draft read $40 million.  Ten million dollars is more accurate.]