Chapter 15 . The FBI Story . . . At first, for several years, I had no idea at all that a homosexual dimension of the narrative in the legend might even exist. There was only one clue and, in isolation, it meant very little. This concerned a visit by two FBI agents in late 1982 following the murder of the chairman of my dissertation committee at the University of Massachusetts, Daniel Jordan. At the time I was living in Arizona again. . This story within the larger story can be told succinctly. . I only learned at some point after 2002 that Dr. Jordan probably was killed by agents of the Khomeini regime in Iran. This is still uncertain but from such evidence as is known publicly this is the most reasonable supposition. Jordan was one of the most prominent leaders of the Baha'i Faith in the United States, he had close connections with the world center of the religion located in Haifa, and was active in seeking to halt persecution of Bahai's in Iran. Given the many murders carried out by the regime in those years, most in Iran but some elsewhere, it is entirely plausible that he was marked for death in 1981, the assassination carried out a year later. . This is pointed out because there isn't any other reasonable motive for the murder. But in 1982, no longer a Baha'i, since I resigned from the faith in 1972, I had no information that would have allowed me to think critically about Jordan's death. Which, it seems, the FBI understood and counted on when they questioned me about the killing. . I was assured that the death was associated with Dr. Jordan's "homosexuality." This was incomprehensible. I had known Dan as a friend years before; I had gotten to know his wife, Nancy, and had seen their children. The report of the FBI agents did not make sense and yet would anyone in the Federal Bureau of Investigation lie? Silly me, of course they would if it suited their purposes, but at the time that idea was foreign to my thought processes. . The question this raised, the more that I thought about it, was why had the agents contacted me? They had asked if I knew of homosexual friends of Dr. Jordan. What homosexual friends? Moreover, the Baha'i Faith is strongly opposed to toleration of homosexuality, why would anyone look for homosexuals in proximity to the religion's leadership? . There wasn't anything further that I could do with this -it turns out- bogus 'information' but the episode stayed lodged in memory. It took until late 1987 to finally add 2 + 2. I've also forgotten exactly how that insight came about but it then became clear as a strong hypothesis that the FBI had been seeking to coax some kind of inadvertent admission from me. Admission to what? Did I know of homosexual friends of Dr. Jordan? If I did know what would be the most likely reason? This way of thinking may derive from TV detective drama, maybe Columbo episodes running at the time, in any case things now made sense. . . There was an additional consideration: Why would the FBI ask? Why would they suggest that homosexuality was a factor in Jordan's death unless the idea was topical, in some sense, in their contacting me? That is, apparently they were making an assumption about me -an assumption that had no basis in reality. . This line of reasoning led to a further question: Who was the dirty sonovabitch who was smearing me that way? It took only a second or two to answer that question. This was something else I needed to defend against. . As an aside, previous to this time I had hitch-hiked to various locations, usually after the conclusion of some kind of temporary job, seeking employment in a new location. I did not own a vehicle, my VW van having been lost when I hit some black ice in Wyoming in 1978 and it rolled over and was demolished. I had escaped uninjured except for some scratches but no longer had transportation of my own. . During one adventure on the road, thumb to the wind, a policeman stopped me and ran an FBI background check. The outcome was that I was completely "clean," there were no outstanding warrants and no reasons to detain me. This being the case, why would two agents think that I might know useful information in their investigation of a murder? I did not exactly have a record of association with hit men or the West Coast underworld. The worst anyone could say was that there had been an ordinance violation or two and a handful of traffic tickets spaced over several decades. And in 1982 my last contact with Dr. Jordan was already about nine years in the past. . What else to do with these considerations wasn't obvious but they also raised questions. There was more going on than appeared on the surface. At this time the idea that there might have been a concocted legend about me was still rudimentary; the FBI had provided me with motivation to dig deeper and try and make more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit. . . What else the Cuba part of the legend might have been useful for I cannot say, but it also would have "sounded right" because of my last name. "Rojas," needless to say, is Spanish. Actually, there also are a small number of Rojas surnames in Portuguese language nations like Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique, plus Portugal itself, but that consideration can slide. Rojas is nearly a 100% Spanish phenomenon. Therefore I "naturally" have an affinity for Spanish speaking Latin America in general and Cuba in particular. Or so Toffler could insist. . There is one little problem with this construction, however. In my case the name derives from my step father, who was Filipino. In case you are unsure of where the Philippine Islands are located, let me assure you that the Republic of the Philippines is found in Asia, next to Indonesia, not far from Taiwan, at the westernmost limits of the Pacific Ocean. . This, it should be obvious, goes a long way toward explaining my interests in Asian religion, the arts of Asia, and Asian history. And it explains why, despite a Spanish surname, I'm just not that concerned about Latin America. What I am concerned about is the Far East. . And Europe, since genetically my background is German and Polish, But that is another story which is pretty much beside the point for this book.
. Another issue can also be disposed of here. Many foreign agents spy for the sake of money. This is hardly the only reason but it is common. And even spies who work for foreign governments receive some kind of remuneration. Thousands of dollars would pass hands along the way, repeatedly. . Yet anyone who looked into the matter in those years would know that my lifestyle was that of a vagabond; there was no evidence of affluence in anything I did or in terms of possessions. What, then, became of the money I would supposedly have been paid by 'spy central'? . That is an easy problem to solve: Invent a gambling habit, or at least a disastrous gambling spree that left me penniless. The problem with this false explanation is that I don't gamble. Not "never," there was a game of poker in Arizona in the early 1990s where the "pot" consisted of US coins, and it seems there was another poker game with similar stakes amounting to a few dollars maybe twenty years before that, but this pretty well sums up my gambling history. Unless you count three or four visits to the race track years before to place $5 bets on the horses and, years before that, office football pools. .place Basically gambling is a waste of time, therefore, why bother? Everyone knows the odds; the "house" always comes out on top. Besides, there are better things to do in life. Gambling might make sense for a professional gambler but the time that is required to master those kinds of skills would be time lost to study of history or US politics or planetary astronomy. Gambling is not for me, and this includes playing lotteries, which I absolutely never do and have never done. . Hopefully, this matter is understood as meaningless. Also hopefully, the reader now begins to understand the sense of outrage that I began to feel. I knew that lies were being told but allegations of homosexuality were contemptible like nothing else. From that time onward I had the view that at such time as revenge becomes possible there will be no mercy shown anyone who has had any part in defaming my character. It does not matter who: An FBI agent, the cleaning lady, the president, anyone with any responsibility for this smear. . Anyone. . Especially since people who knew me in the past also knew that my 'social interests' were -as they have always been- exclusively heterosexual. . How many people knew me during the years I was married to Sherry? A large number. There cannot be even one who had any idea at all that, at least until the last year or so of the marriage when everything fell apart, that we were (very) sexually active. Something similar (although less obviously) was also true with respect to Thea. And there were short duration episodes with other women along the way. . Plus, as an added bonus, several women can attest that I gave it my best to cultivate relationships with them that went unrequited. Had it been entirely up to me I would have gotten laid every day of my life except in times or serious illness throughout my entire life. And this fact has never been concealed. . Any other view necessarily is a total lie. . . . ------------------------------------------------------- . . . . Chapter 16 . The questionable value of public opinion. . . . Not that many people have any idea about how Communists operate. Nor are many people at all well informed about use of disinformation, -lies told by the federal government- for political purposes. Nor do many people really comprehend the extent of lying on the part of the news media -when journalists aren't simply withholding information that the public has every right to know. . Very few Americans are remotely well-informed on such issues. Most people either live in some dream world where official sources are always the good guys, or live in a media induced neverworld where "news" consists of snippets of information embedded in jokes told on late night television or in recent movies. Most people are ridiculously ignorant, to be completely candid about it.. . This is true for both Right-wingers as well as Leftists. Compounding the problem is the fact that hardly any well-meaning academics are the least competent in the political arena, but things are the way they are, not what they should be. Which says that when discussing homosexuality most people deserve no respect whatsoever for their opinions. . Let me repeat this statement so that there is no mistake: When discussing homosexuality most people deserve no respect whatsoever for their opinions. . However, I am not about to allow the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are too preoccupied with everything else in life to do the least research on much of anything. The whole spectacle makes me ill. . Pick any topic, any issue, your choice. . Islam? How many people have read even one (1) "critical" -scholarly- book on the subject? If it is as many as 10% that would be an unbelievable surprise even though, given the world since 2001, you might expect that the number would be closer to 90%. Finding information about actual numbers of books sold is difficult. Even after a serious web search the best I could find was the presumed fact that the only book on the subject that was a best seller in all the years since 2001 was a tear-jerk tome called Three Cups of Tea, which is relevant to just about nothing. It may well be true that rural Muslims in central Asia can be good and decent people but this assumes that they have no idea what is in the Koran, or interpret the book idiosyncratically, and have values that derive from non-Muslim sources. . Karen Armstrong has sold well, but this seems to mean 100,000 copies here and 150,000 there, but nothing she writes on the topic of Islam can be considered as anything other than apologetics written by a bleeding heart. Millions of Christians have purchased volumes of the worthless "Left Behind" series as if Bible prophecies interpreted by a zealot have something important to say about the Mid East, but who is kidding whom? All such books have close to zero value and merely reinforce the indefensible view that only narrowly understood Christian faith is true -or the equally indefensible belief in non-Christian books that all religions are one -but the secret is out, they are not. . Quality books on Islam like Ibn Warraq's Why I Am Not a Muslim, while selling well globally -different estimates put the total since 1995 into the hundreds of thousands- it should be remembered that the population of the United States is over 300 million. And most books on the subject of Islam sell far less, with scholarly texts sometimes considered successful if sales exceed 20,000 or 25,000. The overall situation is not nearly as bleak as it was before 2000, a best guess for sales of books on Islam is the 1990s would be 1% or no more than 2%, but such numbers are pathetic no matter how you look at them. E-book totals should push these numbers up but even if they doubled the figures the result would still be anemic. . The situation for books about homosexuality is even worse. This is not in reference to so-called "gay books" which are primarily sold to homosexuals and written to promote homosexuality. These kinds of books generally also have poor sales -one tally says that the range for the vast majority of titles is between 10,000 and 50,000 copies- although occasionally a volume will sell in the hundreds of thousands even if this is rare. Reference instead is to well conceived texts about homosexuality, intended for a general readership, written by researchers who are unafraid to look at facts objectively and to criticize homosexuality when the facts warrant doing so. . One of the few books of this kind to appeal to a wide readership is Dr. Charles Socarides' 1995 opus, Homosexuality -A Freedom Too Far. After nearly an hour of searching I could not find any sales totals for this book anywhere. All that can be done here is to guess, a number of 100,000 may be somewhere in the vicinity of the actual figure. The book has been reviewed at many websites since its publication and remains topical. Conceivably this estimate is low. In any case, again, we are looking at less than 1/ 10th of a percent of the US population who have read the book. That leaves more than 99. 9% who have not. . You might double or triple reader totals if you add people who check out books from libraries but the best imaginable case still says that those unfamiliar with this text, the best generally available, comprise 99% of the .population . Some Christian texts that discuss homosexuality sell reasonably well but, to be honest, far too many Evangelical authors, in terms of scholarship, are the lightest of lightweights. The focus of their attention is elsewhere, such as on saving souls, and all kinds of other considerations -for them- necessarily come first. Scholarship may not be an afterthought but it is clear that they often don't have a clear idea of what scholarship actually is. To be kind, this limits the effectiveness of what they write. . Some advertisements suggest that multitudes of Christian believers, on the contrary, have access to critical books on homosexuality. And from what I have seen online it may well be true that John Ankerberg and John Weldon's The Facts On Homosexuality is first rate work. Blurbs claim that titles in the "Facts On" series have sold in excess of 800,000 copies. Which may be a correct number. But that refers to a multi-volume series on many different topics, combined sales, and these are "books" of 100 pages or less. The "Facts On" opus about homosexuality may have sold 70 or 80 thousand. Books about homosexuality by other Christian publishers as a rule probably usually sell even fewer copies. . In other words, the available numbers tell us that the vast majority of Americans are ludicrously uninformed on major issues that effect the entire country and the entire culture. Which is shameful. And which should tell anyone capable of reason that such mass scale ignorance makes it fairly easy for the mass media to manipulate public opinion. . All of this being true, why should public opinion on the issue of homosexuality influence my views of the subject in any way? I am not impressed by the opinions of 300 million uninformed people -whatever their actual number may be. . What does have an impact on my conclusions on questions of homosexuality. are scientific findings in scholarly journals and in serious, critical books. Added up, thinking of the study I have done especially since some point in the 1990s, I have spent approximately 4 or 5 years doing research. . These are my conclusions: . Homosexuality is a sickness, and to the extent that religious metaphor is appropriate in characterizing such morbid behavior and warped values, it is totally evil and deserving the strongest possible enmity. Nothing about it is in any way normal or healthy and anyone who thinks otherwise has been duped and now takes pride in their ignorance and bad judgement. . So that you will know -and not falsely assume anything at all about my views on the subject. . What I cannot overlook is the fact that public opinion that is approving of homosexuality is irresponsible, it is based on ignorance, and demonstrates one thing above all others, most people are susceptible to misinformation. They look to their also uniformed peers for guidance in what to believe about controversial topics; they have extreme difficulty in thinking for themselves precisely because they are so poorly informed. Quite simply, they put approval of their peers above truth. . As for the specious argument that "times change, get with the new realities of American life," such 'logic' deserves nothing but contempt. Majorities make mistakes, as many elections demonstrate, and that argument justifies intellectual laziness and ignorance. What it says is: Why bother to make yourself informed? There is no need to actually do any research, it is much easier to watch television, absorb media biases, and call it enlightenment. Then you can sneer at people who have a conscience, who give a damn what happens to their children and the children of others, and who are sickened by the madness that is sweeping through American society. . For most people there is no such thing as quest for truth. The concept does not register. It is meaningless. What does matter is "climbing the corporate ladder," freedom to express one's favorite biases, and entertainment. "Truth" is whatever public opinion says it is, no thinking required, no research required either, because that would subtract time from private gratifications. Which is a mindset that cannot be justified. . If you take the view that homosexuals should be granted the same rights as sexually normal people you should be ashamed of yourself. You should feel the deepest possible sense of embarrassment. You have sold your soul to the Devil -but, unlike Faust, you have gotten nothing in return. . There is no such thing as a "right" to be mentally ill, there is no such thing as a right to go up someone's ass, and there is no such thing as a right to be infected by every medical disease that is associated with homosexuality, a list that includes: Hepatitis A, B, C, D, and cytomegalovirus, Giardia lamblia, aka, "gay bowel disease", penile edema, herpes simplex infections, histolytica, chemical sinusitis, infections with Chlamydia trachomatis, enteric diseases (Shigella species infections, Campylobacter jejuni, etc.), allergic proctitis , fecal incontinence, anal fissure and rectosigmoid tears, hemorroids, etcetera, and did anyone mention acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, aka, AIDS This list was supplied by Kathleen Melonakos, M.A., R.N., in an article she wrote entitled "Why Isn't Homosexuality Considered A Disorder On The Basis Of Its Medical Consequences?" I completely agree with her but would add that homosexuals are associated with substance abuse at rates a magnitude greater that for heterosexuals, are violent with each other at rates that dwarf heterosexual violence in marriage, that they become alcoholics at rates far in excess of rates among heterosexuals, and that the homosexual rate of child abuse is on the order of ten to twenty times the rate among heterosexuals. . It is well worth reading Kathleen Melonakos' entire paper and it is available online for free. And her observations are astonishing. . She begins her paper by noting that : . " I worked as an RN for several years during the eighties and nineties at Stanford University Medical Center, where I saw some of the damage homosexuals do to their bodies with some of their sexual practices. As a result of that eye-opening experience, I much admire the work of NARTH in the research and treatment of homosexuality." . She went on to add : "I have long been concerned about the serious medical consequences which result from the gay-affirming attitudes that predominate in the San Francisco Bay Area." In fact, she knew, personally, several homosexuals who died as young as their mid-forties. And it wasn't just her who noticed these grim realities. One of her colleagues in the medical profession, " the head of the surgery department at Stanford," told Melonakos about "case histories of homosexuals needing emergency surgery due to "fisting," "playing with toys," (inserting objects into the rectum) and other bizarre acts. I am certain--in light of my clinical experience, and since doing a considerable amount of studying about it since that time--that homosexuality is neither normal nor benign ; rather, it is a lethal behavioral addiction." . In addition there is this question : . " Can anyone refute that increased morbidity and mortality is an unavoidable result of male-with-male sex--not to mention the increased rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, suicide and other maladies that so often accompany a homosexual lifestyle? People with this whole cluster of behavior patterns are somehow 'normal'? " . Melonakos concluded with criticism of the APA, an organization that has "escaped accountability for [its] lack of scientific and professional integrity. "This is," she added, "especially incredible since the advent of the AIDS epidemic. There are currently an estimated 900,000 people in the United States that are infected with the HIV virus, or 1 in 300 Americans. Though there has been a decrease in AIDS deaths per year due to drug therapy, (which costs an average of $12,000 per patient per year) the rate of new infections per year has remained the same, at 40,000, despite the twenty year "safe-sex" campaign." . What has been the response of the American Psychiatric Association? The APA has remained adamant that homosexuality is normal, that anyone who offers counseling to homosexuals to help them cease in their psychopathology is dangerous to society, and has pushed for even more "homosexual rights." . The APA should be discredited and abolished. . . Don't tell me that there is such a thing as "homosexual rights." What there is, is homosexual criminality, homosexual disease, and morbid homosexual psychopathology. There is no excuse for toleration of homosexuality and this scourge needs to be rooted out of society completely. . This should be understood for exactly what it says. And since some point no later then 1978 have I ever, at any time, said anything to any other effect. Hence, anyone who has seen anything that purports to be from me that does say something else is a forgery. . So-called "gay marriage" is a travesty and any judge or Justice that favors this kind of absurdity should be removed from the bench and disbarred. And I have never said anything else about this issue, either. . This matter explained enough for the time being, let us return to the narrative. But much more will be said soon enough. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
