Back in the 1990s, Mike Pence—now governor of Indiana and Donald Trump’s running mate—was president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, a conservative think tank that published a journal called the Indiana Policy Review. The IPR, which boasted Pence’s name on the masthead, published some pretty wacky anti-gay stuff, as Right Wing Watch recently discovered: One article, titled “The Pink Newsroom,” described “gaydom” as a “pathological condition” and argued that gay reporters cannot impartially cover gay-related news.
But the IPR’s most fascinating piece was published a few months earlier, in August 1993. The article, written by IPR Foundation senior fellow Col. Ronald D. Ray, purported to be an argument against allowing gays to serve in the military. “The homosexuals are not as a group able-bodied,” Ray urges. “They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle.”
That’s fairly conventional anti-gay obloquy, especially for the time. But from there, the polemic quickly descends into a stunningly graphic description of gay sex acts. “An understanding of homosexual practices,” Ray writes, by way of a segue, “may prove helpful to America as it deliberates the suitability of homosexuals serving openly in the military.” He then jumps right in:
Beside the general “gay” sexual practices of mutual masturbation and fellatio/cunnilingus, other homosexual practices which are common in the “lifestyle” are more bizarre: Anal intercourse that often causes tearing or bruising of the anus or rectal wall, which is only one cell thick and not designed for this extreme activity. Anal penetration (penetration of the anus by hand, arm, or foreign objects)—In 1983, well over a third of homosexuals admitted to participating in “fisting”—the insertion of hands or arms through the anus. Anal penetration by large objects (including bottles, cucumbers, carrots, light bulbs, dildos and other such “toys”) greatly increases tearing, bruising, and the risk of infection. It also debilitates the sphincter muscles which control the anus and bowel movements. According to one medical study, “fist fornication” is becoming increasingly common. About 80 percent of homosexuals regularly use their tongues to stimulate the anuses of their partners, thus ingesting biologically significant amounts of fecal matter. According to one clinical study: 92 percent of these men reported that they practiced anilingus [rimming].
Incidentally, many of the “studies” that Ray cites are actually conspiratorial anti-gay tracts asserting that gay people are responsible for AIDS and do not deserve government assistance. They have titles like Exposing the AIDS Scandal and Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People.
Ray continues:
About 30 percent of homosexuals admitted to having “showered” in the urine of others, and about 20 percent admitted to ingesting urine. About 15 percent said they regularly seek to be urinated upon, and over 8 percent said they regularly ingest it. In the latest national random survey, 17 percent of homosexuals admitted to having eaten or handled the feces of their partners, and 12 percent reported to giving and receiving enemas for sexual pleasure. Sadomasochism—At least a quarter of homosexuals admit to ritual domination of partners, which involves the use of physical force, violence, and sometimes mutilation as a sexual stimulant.
Again, these dubious statistics are drawn from such vaunted treatises as AIDS: What the Government Isn’t Telling You.
Ray then spells out precisely why these disgusting sex acts—so disgusting that they must be described over and over again in remarkable detail—should exclude gays from military service:
The focus of male homosexuals is upon the anus. Contact with feces is an anathema to soldiers. Every soldier’s first overnight in the field includes instruction in basic field sanitation, avoiding the diseases that come from mishandling feces—and yet the military is being asked to lift the ban on a classification of people whose sexual practices involve oral-anal contact and the ingestion of human feces. The prohibitions against mishandling feces in the field date at least from biblical times.
Then Ray turns to blackmail:
Homosexuality is a grave threat to not only our nation’s health but also our national security in several ways. Almost all homosexuals engage in sexual practices involving degradation or humiliation rarely practiced by heterosexuals. The degrading nature of such practices constitutes the real basis of the homosexual security threat as photographs or a video of a service member or of a civilian policy-maker in such an extremely compromising position makes them vulnerable to blackmail or extortion.
(Actually, there was a blackmail problem involving gays in the military—when homosexuality is banned, malicious servicemembers can use closeted troops’ sexual orientation for blackmail fodder. Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ultimately made gay servicemembers less susceptible to blackmail, as their mere identity was no longer a liability.)
Ray concludes by declaring that “sexual infidelity and promiscuity are at the core of homosexual behavior, and it is inherently hostility [sic] to the moral order America was founded upon.” This view likely aligned with those of his former boss, President Ronald Reagan. Ray served as deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, which notoriously refused to address the AIDS crisis, even as it took the lives of thousands of gay men. (Reagan’s White House joked about gay men dying of AIDS, while his communications director Pat Buchanan called AIDS “nature’s revenge on gay men.”)
Now the man who led the foundation that published Ray’s gay sex disquisition is running for vice president of the United States of America. Sometimes history really does rhyme.
