For some reason that we don’t completely understand, the conservative Washington Times is running a regular column by homosexual writer Andrew Sullivan, and he uses it to attack conservative groups and promote the gay rights agenda. When he attacked AIM for noting a link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the Times gave us an opportunity to respond. But the paper has now given Sullivan another opportunity to insist that the homosexual movement has nothing to do with molesting kids.

It came in an "Inside Politics" column by Greg Pierce, who quoted Sullivan as saying that most of the media had ignored the communist role through a front group called ANSWER in organizing the January 18^th anti-war rally in Washington. Sullivan said, "Can you imagine if a massive gay rights rally had been organized by NAMBLA, the pedophile group? But NAMBLA is to gay rights what ANSWER is to legitimate anti-war sentiment. And no-one in the liberal establishment seems to care."

Once again, Sullivan is trying to make conservatives think that most homosexuals are not extremists and that they have expelled the radicals in their midst. But it’s just not true. NAMBLA has not been the main organizer of any homosexual rights march, and it has been banned from some gay rights parades, but members of NAMBLA have been accepted by the homosexual movement. As Reed noted in his letter to the Times, the International Gay & Lesbian Association, ILGA, had accepted NAMBLA as a member and eighty percent of ILGA’s members had voted for resolutions favorable to NAMBLA. The group reversed course when it was trying to retain its status as a non-governmental organization at the UN. The U.S. was pressuring the U.N. to expel ILGA unless it kicked the pedophiles out.

The founder of the modern homosexual movement, Harry Hay, was a prominent supporter of NAMLBA. This story is told in a book, The Trouble With Harry Hay, which is sympathetic to Hay, who was also a communist. What’s more, this was instrumental in developing the homosexual movement. The book notes, "All of his C.P. [Communist Party] activities were useful training for unforeseen political challenges. Many formulas of Marxist theory…have obvious implications for the challenges he faced in conjuring a gay movement out of nothing."

The homosexual publication, The Advocate, didn’t reveal any of that in a January 21^st article on Hay by Mark Thompson, who was described as one of his friends. Thompson confirms that Hay was "the founder of the modern gay liberation movement," but he fails to note his connections to NAMBLA or the Communist Party.

Andrew Sullivan may be critical of the communists in the Workers World Party, but the party supports him, claiming to "fight on behalf of transgendered people and lesbians, gays and bisexuals…" An article on the group’s Web site notes that one of the first homosexual groups, the Gay Liberation Front, was named "in solidarity" with the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. That was the communist front doing the bidding of Hanoi in a war that took the lives of over 50,000 Americans in the Vietnam.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org