The story of Lot (لوط, Lūṭ) from the Qur'an and Hebrew texts albeit retold with a few differences. Amongst other things, the Qur'anic rendition links the destruction of Sodom specifically to the homosexual activities of its inhabitants, and other criminal activities. This is one of the many stories from the Qur'an which many have attenpted to refute without success, It proves that This Qur'an is indeed the speach of All mighty God(Allah) the Qur'an's confirms that the People of Lot were the first to experience homosexuality. Many claim that homosexuality has been recorded in ancient cultures far before the time of Lot and Abraham (1948–2123 BC). with no real accurate proof .There are many unsubstantiated tales which portray homosexuality, and I challenge others to bring the proof of these claims.
[وَاللَّذَانَ يَأْتِيَـنِهَا مِنكُمْ فَـَاذُوهُمَا]
(And the two persons among you who commit illegal sexual intercourse, punish them both.) Ibn `Abbas and Sa`id bin Jubayr said that this punishment includes cursing, shaming them and beating them with sandals. This was the ruling until Allah abrogated it with flogging or stoning, as we stated. Mujahid said, "It was revealed about the case of two men who do it. As if he was referring to the actions of the people of Lut, and Allah knows best. The collectors of Sunan recorded that Ibn `Abbas said that the Messenger of Allah said,
«مَنْ رَأَيْتُمُوهُ يَعْمَلُ عَمَلَ قَوْمِ لُوطٍ، فَاقْتُلُوا الْفَاعِلَ وَالْمَفْعُولَ بِه»
(Whoever you catch committing the act of the people of Lut (homosexuality), then kill both parties to the act.)
This is the text from the Noble Qur'an regarding the legal punishment for Homosexuals caught in the act is the Muslim society, these laws must be carried out by the Ruler of that Land not individuals from the citizenry.
Among America's culture wars, one of today's most intense controversies rages around the issue alternatively identified, depending on one's point of view, as "normalizing homosexuality" or "accepting gayness." The debate is truly a social-ethical-moral conceptual war that transcends both the scientific and legal, though science and law most often are the weapons of choice. The ammunition for these weapons, however, is persuasion. This article explores how gay rights activists use rhetoric, social psychology, and the media–all the elements of modern marketing–to position homosexuality in order to frame what is discussed in the public arena and how it is discussed. In essence, when it comes to homosexuality, activists want to shape "what everyone knows" and "what everyone takes for granted" even if everyone does not really know and even if it should not be taken for granted. The first strategy of persuasion is to establish a favorable climate for your message so that the communicator (marketer) can influence the future decision without even appearing to be persuading.
Modern America is very much like the Roman Republic. Romans were primarily interested in the practical uses of the art of persuasion just as Americans are immersed in advertising and spin doctoring.
Therefore, those that most influence society today, from lawyers to lawmakers, lobbyists to marketers, descend from the sophists, the experts in rhetoric and the artists of persuasion. Modern rhetorician Richard M. Weaver "was a champion of conservative . . . ideas." "One of the mainstays of conservative thought is a concern for values. Weaver felt that American culture was losing many values worth preserving." These very same concepts underlie the resistance by society at large to affirmation of the homosexual community. The homosexual movement is formed and driven in that conflict.
Weaver's book, Ideas Have Consequences, has been described as "a profound diagnosis of the sickness of our culture." Certainly, this diagnosis is a common argument in opposition to homosexuality. Weaver's defense of language as the touchstone to enduring human values and universal truths is recurring and central to the conception of the role of rhetoric. Weaver describes four ways to interpret a subject rhetorically: "define its nature"; "place it in a cause-and-effect relationship"; interpret it "in terms of relationship of similarity and dissimilarity"; or interpret it "by credit of testimony or authority." The gay rights movement draws upon this strategy in the hope of reshaping American society and laws. Recall Kirk and Madsen's candid admission that, the separability–and manipulability–of the verbal label is the basis for all the abstract principles underlying our proposed campaign." The current debate, then, is framed differently by both sides. Is homosexual behavior normal or abnormal? Are the maladies commonly associated with the homosexual condition (depression, AIDS, suicide, cancer) caused by the behavior itself or society's reaction to it? Are homosexuals just the same as heterosexuals? Should science or society determine the acceptability of "gayness"? If history repeats itself, the point of view that holds sway in America's courts will first hold sway in the minds and hearts of individual citizens, judges, and lawmakers. And the heart and mind of society is the target market that the gay rights campaign means to capture in order to win the courts.
Historically Speaking;
A basic understanding of how the social definition of homosexuality has seen change over the course of this century is important. Homosexuality was considered criminal under the law and evil by the three major faith in the world, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Homosexuals were rescued by the medical establishment when the condition was "medicalized" early in the 1900s and redefined as a pathological condition, a disease. Then, beginning in the 1950s, scientific and political forces converged. Until Alfred Kinsey claimed that the large majority of Americans had homosexual interests and John D. Rockefeller's empire marketed Kinsey's voluminous Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) studies five decades ago, few ever spoke of homosexuality in public let alone as a public possibility. It certainly was not "O.K. to be gay" openly in America.
Even so, several years after the Kinsey bombshells, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP), an organization of esteemed physicians founded by the noted psychiatrist William C. Menninger, still defined homosexuality as a treatable disease, a sexual perversion, and as psychological (not biological) in nature.
As late as 1960, all fifty states maintained laws criminalizing sodomy. In 1963 the New York Academy of Medicine Committee on Public Health, restated that not only was homosexuality a disease (disorder), "some homosexuals have gone beyond the plane of defensiveness and now argue that deviancy is a 'desirable, noble, preferable way of life.'" In 1970, it was estimated that 84% of Americans agreed homosexuality was a "social corruption." In fact, far from homosexuality being considered just a social aberration, it was still officially defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder.
Years of disruptive homosexual protests at APA annual conferences, some openly backed by the Gay Liberation Front, and aggressive internal homosexual activism finally changed all that in 1973. This political and non-scientific decision was "simply the opening phase of a war with normality. It was part of a two-phase sexual radicalization, the second phase being the raising of homosexuality to the level of an alternative lifestyle." It appears that this war analogy is justified. The success of the effort to neutralize the APA's disapproval gave the homosexual movement just the weapon they needed for the campaign we see today.
In February 1988, a 'war conference' of 175 leading gay activists, representing organizations from across the land, convened in Warrenton, Virginia, (near Washington, D.C.) to establish a four-point agenda for the gay movement." After that meeting, Harvard-trained social scientists and homosexual activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen wrote a homosexual manifesto that proposed dismissing the movement's outworn techniques in favor of carefully calculated public relations propaganda . . . . laying groundwork for the next stage of the gay revolution, and its ultimate victory over what they termed "bigotry." The strategies they promulgated are best understood by peering into the authors' shared fundamental belief: "Any society that flatly denies the fact that one or two citizens in every ten have strong homosexual interests, and structures its laws and values around this denial, is, to this extent, seriously ill." Driven by a worldview of victimization, the need for revolution and the establishment of a cultural identity, their strategy was unabashed and blunt: manipulate and control public discourse in order to unite and legitimate one group even at the expense of others. The war goal was to force acceptance of homosexual culture into the mainstream, to silence opposition, and ultimately to convert American society. This "stunningly systematic and controversial blueprint . . . of carefully calculated public relations propaganda," has value as a template to guide discussion of how the homosexual movement hopes to achieve social power and codify homosexual behavior as a right.
Uncivil Rights:
Four months before Rosa Parks refused to vacate her bus seat to a white man in 1955, she attended a retreat at the Highlander center in Tennessee, where she took a workshop alongside blacks and whites on school desegregation. More than a half century later, the Highlander center is still training soldiers in the fight for equal rights. Only now the battleground has shifted. Last January, four dozen gay and lesbian activists gathered for a center retreat overlooking the Smoky Mountains to get inspiration on how they could show—not just tell—America that their rights are being violated.
But how? There are no
“heterosexuals only” Woolworth counters where gays and lesbians can
protest segregation; even Woolworth itself is long gone from the U.S.
“We needed to create the urgency and critical mass to stop the injustice
towards our community,” says Robin McGehee, a mother of two and
cofounder of the civil-disobedience group that was formed during those
five days in Tennessee, called GetEQUAL. “What are our lunch-counter
images?”
As
the fight over same-sex marriage and “don’t ask, don’t tell” rages in
the courts, Congress, and the media, gay activists and their allies are
invoking the language and imagery of the civil-rights battles of a half
century ago. And their efforts are changing the tenor of the debate.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, calling for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” told a
Connecticut reporter earlier this month that the fight for gay rights
is the new “front lines” of the civil-rights movement. When President
Obama included protections for gays and lesbians in federal hate-crime
legislation earlier this year, the Associated Press called it “the
biggest expansion of the civil-rights-era law in decades.” And at last
week’s federal appellate-court hearing in San Francisco on same-sex
marriage, one of the judges pointedly asked whether California voters,
whose 2008 passage of Proposition 8 stripped gays of the right to marry,
were entitled to reinstate school
segregation. “How is this different?” Judge Michael Daly Hawkins asked
the attorney defending the measure. Legal heavyweights Ted Olson and
David Boies, representing the pro-gay-marriage side, wrote in their
plaintiffs’ brief that the case tests the proposition whether gays and
lesbians “should be counted as ‘persons’ under the 14th Amendment or
whether they constitute a permanent underclass ineligible for protection
under that cornerstone of our Constitution.” The 14th Amendment removed
the clause once embedded in the Constitution that slaves equaled three
fifths of a person.
The
rhetoric has inspired gays and lesbians. But it has also galvanized
their opponents, who say homosexuals are fighting for “special rights,”
not civil rights. Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage
says of same-sex matrimony: “It’s not a civil right, it’s a civil
wrong”—one that will diminish the religious freedom of those who
consider homosexuality sinful. The “special rights” argument was
reflected in the Pentagon’s report this month on “don’t ask, don’t
tell.” “Throughout the force, rightly or wrongly, we heard both subtle
and overt resentment towards ‘protected groups’ of people and the
possibility that gay men and lesbians could, with repeal, suddenly be
elevated to a special status,” the report found.
Gays
and lesbians “may want to cast their fight in civil-rights terms, and a
lot of people are buying it. But not the faith community and especially
not the black community,” says Bishop Harry Jackson, whose Hope Christian
Church has a flock of 3,000 in the Washington, D.C., area. Indeed, some
70 percent of African-Americans voted yes on California’s Prop 8, and
exit polls found similar levels of opposition among blacks for a
marriage initiative in Florida that same year. After the Washington,
D.C., City Council last year approved gay marriage in the District,
Jackson joined forces with the National Organization for Marriage in
petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to allow voters to decide on
overturning the law. “Many African-Americans believe gays are
discriminated against, but they don’t believe marriage is a civil-rights
issue,” says Jackson, who says his father was threatened at gunpoint in
the 1950s by a state trooper while working on a voter-registration
drive. “There are issues of acceptance, but there is no back of the bus;
there are no lynchings.” There is also the ongoing debate as to whether
homosexuality is an immutable trait or a choice. “It’s not immutable,”
says Jackson. “And it’s not an externally observable characteristic
unless you want to flaunt it.”from The Daily Beast
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