Over the years, I’ve seen some very manipulative tricks used by gay parenting advocates to push their agenda onto people who are naturally skeptical.

It was bad when gay couples showed up at George Bush’s Easter egg hunt and demanded that their kids be acknowledged as children of homosexuals.

It was ghastly when two lesbians forced an eight-year-old boy to confront Michele Bachmann at a book signing, saying, “My mom is gay, and she don’t need fixin’.”

It was atrocious when the gay producer of Glee made a public fuss about burning, in Nazi book-banning style, any clothes with a Dolce & Gabbana label because as a gay “father” by surrogacy, he felt personally outraged by the Italian designers’ criticism of third-party reproduction.

It was repulsive when gay men like Dan Savage and Jeremy Hooper flaunted stories of their adopted children and bragged about how much better they were, as gay “dads,” than messy straight people who get pregnant by accident.

But the recent antics by two gay men in Florida take the cake.  And no, we are not talking about a Christian wedding cake this time.  We are talking about two homosexuals who obtained an infant son somehow.  (As with many such couples, they manage to leave undisclosed the details of how they wrangled custody of a helpless baby and cut the mother out of the picture.)  They went to an Episcopal church and scheduled a baptism.  The church – rightfully so – canceled the baptism, presumably on the grounds that baptizing the child in a formal ceremony with the two dads would be heretical complicity with the lie that the men have a right to call this boy their child.

And so, joining the ranks of other nasty and underhanded gay litigators, the dads posted their sob story on Facebook.  Rich McCaffrey, one of the gay men, shared a narrative about how he and his “husband Eric” just wanted their son to grow up with a Christian support system.  The claim is absurd, given that “honor thy father and thy mother” is one of the Ten Commandments, and by raising the boy with two fictive “dads,” they are forcing his whole upbringing to clash irreconcilably with Christianity.  From what I could tell, they offered no explanation for why this boy has become their property, where his mother is, whether his mother is alive, or why they made no effort to place the boy in a proper home with a mom and dad if Christianity was so important to them.

While feigning victimization and inveighing against a church for refusing to partake in a grave injustice, they expressed no remorse about the far greater and existential wrong they have inflicted on this poor blameless baby.

Maybe Rich and Eric did not, as one would be quick to assume, stage this melodrama.  Maybe this isn’t a crass ploy orchestrated by someone with friends in the press ready to create an insta-controversy (just add baby photos!).  Maybe we can take seriously the simple claims by Rich and Eric that raising a boy for his whole life without a mother, claiming ownership of other people’s children, and using an infant as a human shield are normal in their eyes.  Fair, even.  Maybe it is true that in their worldview, the guilty party is the one institution, a little Episcopal church, that refused to play along with their fraud and say something to awaken them to the fact that something is amiss with what they have done.

If the Facebook post is sincere, it is all the more pathetic.  They really believe the gay movement’s unenlightened propaganda and have internalized it.  They are blind to right and wrong.  Everything conservatives and moralists predicted is right – if they believe what they write on Facebook, the stereotypes and stigmas have been vindicated, and people had good reasons for banishing homosexuality all along.  Regardless of the anatomical issues related to their sex acts, the phenomenon of “homosexuality” leads ineluctably to a moral aphasia, a profound delusion and inability to discern justice from injustice, even when it involves justice for a tiny, helpless infant.

Imagine growing up with two guardians who are always the victim, even when they are victimizing you.

In all these cases, gays claiming to be “parents” (they are not parents; rather, they are simply guardians of charges unfairly consigned to their power) use kids as human shields.  This overwhelming trend toward objectifying, exploiting, and abusing children in order to enhance gay adults’ prestige is the single most powerful reason for my dogged opposition to the entire LGBT agenda.  No human being is more lacking in a moral compass than someone who takes advantage of children. My Jewish co-editor Rivka Edelman shared a Hebrew proverb with me: “if you are kind to the cruel, you will be cruel to the weak.”  People who hurt children to benefit themselves are the cruelest people in the universe, and it is wrong to behave kindly toward such adults, because in trying to curry favor with the guardians, one would be abandoning the child to secret suffering.

Resist the temptation to debate whether the church acted rightly or wrongly in denying the baby baptism.  In many faiths (including my own), baptism isn’t even something that happens until someone is an adult anyway.  We can all pray for the baby and hope that God extends his grace to him.  We can beg God to intervene somehow and deliver the baby from the home of two men who are ill-equipped to care for him.  The two gay men in this case arranged the baptism so that the clergy would be left speechless and unable to register opposition to their simultaneous claims to be the father of a baby they should not be raising.  All the major wrongdoing here was committed by Rich and Eric.  The only true sufferer here is the baby boy.  The church is left with a false choice between two acts: inhospitality to an infant or acceptance of cruelty to the infant.  Rich and Eric contrived that choice; they have nobody to criticize but themselves.

Robert Oscar Lopez is president of the International Children’s Rights Institute.  His work can be followed at English Manif.