In July 2003 Minnesota State Rep. Arlon Lindner Viewed A... Essay - 2,092 words

In July 2003 Minnesota state Rep. Arlon Lindner viewed a travelling Holocaust exhibit after that he defended his position that gays and lesbians were never persecuted during the Holocaust. His latest allegation goes even further, saying that "the main gay participants in the Holocaust were Nazi concentration camp guards," and he suggests that homosexuality helped lead to World War II. Lindner said he bases his accusations on the book "The Pink Swastika," published by Abiding Truth Ministries, a right wing fundamentalist group based in Wisconsin that claims gays were responsible for the rise of Hitler. Lindner, a transplanted Texan with a degree from a Baptist seminary has drawn fire since declaring that gays were rewriting history by "claiming" to have been victims of the Holocaust."I'm not convinced that they were persecuted," he said. During debate on a bill sponsored by Linder that would strip gays and lesbians of state human rights protections the Republican told legislators: "What I'm trying to prevent is the Holocaust of our children [from AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases]. If you want to sit around and wait until America becomes another African continent, you do that, but I'm going to do something." That immediately drew severe criticism from the House's only two black members. Rep.


Frank Hornstein, whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, called Lindner's views "deeply offensive to millions of Americans whose relatives suffered during the Third Reich." But lets to proove that the persecution of homosexuality were really in the time of Holocaust. With the coming of the Christian era in the first century A.D., homo- sexuality was defined as an unnatural act and a violation of God's law. This represented a significant departure from the status of homosexuality in ancient times and in the classical Greek and Roman era. In their survey of the literature on 76 preliterate societies, Ford and Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior, found homosexuality accepted in about half the societies studied. The one remarkable exception was in Hebrew culture; homosexuality was expressly prohibited in the Law of Moses. The Mosaic prohibitions were retained by the New Testament writers.


Throughout the Medieval and early modern periods, these definitions were retained and punishments for violators became increasingly harsh, including the death penalty. Laws prescribing the death penalty existed in France up to the French Revolution, in England until the early 1860's and in Scotland until the 1880's. The Enlightenment brought about some liberalization, i.e., decriminalization, of homosexuality in France and some of the German states, e.g., Bavaria. An exception to this trend, however, was Prussia. In 1871, when the Prussian-dominated German Empire (the First Reich) was established, the Reich Criminal Code expressly prohibited unnatural sex acts, including sex acts "committed between persons of male sex or by humans with animals." Such behaviors were "punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights". There had been a sodomy law since German unification in 1871, but it specifically targeted sodomy (anal intercourse), and due to the delicate matter of finding evidence, numbers of sentenced homosexuals stayed low until 1933.


And in 1929 it seemed as if the gay and lesbian movement had reached one of their most important goals, the abolishment of the sodomy law 175. While rewriting the moral code, a majority within the parliamentary commission voted against the continuation of 175. But due to the growing influence of the Nazi party, the commission's endorsement was never introduced to the parliament. A male who indulges in criminally indecent behavior with another male, or who allows himself to participate in such activity, will be punished with imprisonment. If one of the participants is under the age of twenty-one, and if the offense has not been grave, the court may dispense with the sentence of imprisonment. After Hitler's rise to power, both the Gestapo and SS pressed hard to broaden the old and "inefficient" sodomy law to an extent where evidence was not needed anymore.


Homosexuality, so went the argument, was not just a criminal offense, but a danger to the future Aryan race. The Nazi party incorporated anti-gay laws into their ideology of racial hygiene and population politics. In 1935, the same year when the Nuremberg laws[furthered legal exclusion of persons considered alien from German life, drawing a distinction between so-called Aryans and so-called non-Aryans. The term "non-Aryan" applied to all non-Germanic peoples, but was applied to, and implemented primarily against Jews, Gypsies, and Afro-Germans. The Nuremberg Laws removed their citizenship and defined them and prohibited them from engaging in sexual relations with Germans.] were published, the revised law 175 was put on the books (june 28, 1935). Already the suggestion of homosexual intent was grounds for arrest. The numbers of sentenced gay men rose immediately.


The legal changes came as no surprise; as early as the mid-1920's the Nazis had made clear that in a future Aryan Reich, there wouldn't be a place for homosexuals. In the 'Golden twenties' a visible gay and lesbian culture had - albeit cautiously -flourished in urban areas and a network of gay and lesbian organisations, publisher houses, journals, famous festivities and social groups had developped. In Berlin alone, close to 100 bars served their gay and lesbian customers. Soon after taking office, Hitler banned all gay and lesbian organisations. Meanwhile, storm troopers raided the institutions and gathering places of the gay and lesbian community. In the famous book-burning in Berlin in May 1933, many books came from the looting of the "Institute for sexual science" which was founded by the Jewish homosexual Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. His institute was the first of its kind and world-famous for its collection and documentation on the field of sexology.


Starting his work at the turn of the century, his work and his institute had been the centerpiece of the first gay and lesbian movement in Germany. Being Jewish and gay, he became an early symbol within Nazi propaganda for the 'decay' of the Weimar Republic. Only the lucky coincidence that he was on a world tour in 1933 prevented his murder. In 1934, the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler created a special police department to combat male homosexuality. As early as December of that year, gay men were subjected to systematic criminal persecution. In 1936 the Federal Security Office for combating a ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: nazi, lesbian, camp, homosexual, nazi germany

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