What do you do if you spend your entire career standing up for gay civil rights, only to watch the movement get hijacked by an ideological group that wants to upend the basic moral framework of society?

It would be a tough call for a lot of people, but there is a growing movement of gay rights activists who are pushing back hard against the alphabet mob who are trying to sexualize children.

It’s a sure path to ostracism and a sure path to self-respect.

One such individual is Jeffery M. Cleghorn, an attorney who has spent his life working to defend gay rights and to help gay families navigate legal issues.

His body of work and biography is impressive. A former Army Major, he describes it in a letter to the Connecticut State Legislation in submitted testimony regarding CT HB6638, a law I wrote about earlier:

My interest and perspective are formed as a long-time gay-rights activist and attorney, most recently serving on the board of Lambda Legal (2015-2017) after beginning work in the gay movement in 1997 through 2003 on the legal staff of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), and also serving on SLDN’s Board from 2007 through 2013. I am a past president of the Stonewall Bar Association of Georgia and have also served on the boards of Georgia Equality and AID Atlanta.

Cleghorn has also worked with the LGB Alliance and is a supporter of Gays against Groomers, one of my favorite Twitter follows.

You may notice something about his biography and the body of work: the focus of his advocacy has been to integrate gays into the larger fabric of society, rather than tear the society down. He fought for gay marriage and for gays to be able to serve in the military openly, and advocacy for those causes eventually won over skeptics by making a very simple appeal: gays are just like everybody else.

In other words, gays are not a threat to your way of life; they want to be a part of it.

It has been a very appealing message to Americans, whose opinion on gay rights changed due to that appeal. Not that long ago gays were seen as essentially “other,” and they felt threatening to people. But people who want to get married, have children and serve in the military sound pretty normal.

The first thing I think of when I look at Pete Buttigieg is not that he is gay, but that he is incompetent. That is progress! He strikes me as a pretty typical liberal politician of the Bill Clinton era and looks like one too. There is nothing threatening to the average American about Pete Buttigieg liberals, whatever their sexual orientation. We just want to defeat them at the polls.

But the modern alphabet ideology is not about expanding the circle of normality to an ever-widening group of people who want and deserve to have a shot at the American Dream. It is about tearing down the American Dream and replacing it with a bizarre transhumanist vision where societal norms are replaced with the celebration of … well, anything the alphabet people happen to want at any given moment.

I’m not going to get into the deeper discussion of transhumanism because, frankly, I haven’t done a deep enough dive myself. But at the root of alphabet ideology is the notion that Nature can be replaced by Will and that there is no such thing as Natural Right, Natural Law, and ultimately moral or biological limits we should respect.

They are building a New Man, as it were, as has been the goal of the Left since the French Revolution and as developed by Marxists. The Soviets and the Chinese Communist Party had their own versions, and the alphabet movement has transcended both by denouncing biology itself.

We have seen how transgender madness has spread through the cultural Marxists, and have also been confronted by the fact that the cultural Marxists have captured much of the Democratic Party elite. They have declared alphabet ideology “The Civil Rights Movement of Our Time!,” as if Martin Luther King’s vision of a society where everybody can participate as full citizens is somehow the same claim as toddlers can be transsexuals and are sexual beings.

This is where Cleghorn comes in. As a fully credentialed gay rights activist of long standing, who has fought some of the biggest civil rights battles for gays, he has decided to take a stand against the new alphabet ideology that has hijacked his movement.

The letter/testimony he is submitting to the Connecticut legislature draws a bright line between gay rights and, in this case, the redefinition of sexual orientation.

You see, despite claiming otherwise (and despite a deeply dishonest Associated Press “fact check” challenging the reality), Connecticut’s proposal to change the definition of “sexual orientation” in CT HB6638 does indeed open the door to the inclusion of pedophiles (not legalizing the actual pedophilic practices yet, but the sexual attraction to children as a recognized and legitimate paraphilia) as a protected sexual orientation.

I have, in recent years, become alarmed at the targeting and recruiting of children by the “LGBTQ+ non-binary queer transgender” phenomena that inhabits what was formerly known as the gay rights movement. …

“Included in the “Q+” part of the LGBTQ+ identity is pedophilia, which activists are seeking to rebrand as “Minor Attracted Persons” or MAPs. Pedophilia, like each of the other “identities” inside the LGBTQ+ gender world, even has its own flag. So when you redefine sexual orientation from sexuality based on sex to an identity based on gender, this completely changes its meaning.

Many within the LGBTQ+ groups deny the inclusion of pedophilia within their “movement,” even as others work to soften the public’s perceptions of pedophiles by renaming them “MAPs” and arguing pedophilia is just another sexual orientation. I remember in 2006 a controversy in Atlanta over the debut of a new play – Love, Jerry – which billed itself as “a musical about pedophilia.”

The regrettable truth is for much of the early gay-rights movement pedophilia was considered by many as just another oppressed identity. The ugliness of that truth is detailed in a 2001 Regent’s University Law Review essay by Steve Baldwin, “Child Molestation and the Homosexual Movement.” I take issue with some of Mr. Baldwin’s conclusions, but his factual presentation of pedophilias’ historical presence within the gay community is well documented….

I recall becoming a gay activist in the early 1990’s and battling the taint caused by the National Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), a group that identified as gay pedophiles.

One of the key elements of modern alphabet ideology that distinguishes it from gay rights is the denial of biological sex itself. Gays men are attracted to men. Gay women, women. Bisexuals to both sexes. What distinguishes gays from heterosexuals is simply their attraction to different body parts.

Modern alphabet ideology denies sex itself as a category. Transhumanism is about “freeing” people from their bodies as if we are Cartesian souls shackled to flesh that must somehow be sloughed off. We are pure will, and the proper role of the body is nothing more than to provide pleasant sensations.

The freeing of the will also frees us from morality; disposal of bodily limits also means that the will has no bodily constraints. This is the moral foundation for the idea that children can consent to drastic, permanent changes to their bodies as soon as, or even before, they can talk. Jazz Jennings’ path to transition was set when he was a toddler because his mother “knew” he was transgender. Some gender doctors claim that transgenderism is known to babies in the womb.

It is this same sort of claim that is now being made by “Minor Attracted Persons” activists, who claim that there are willing children who would engage in sexual relations with adults. The United Nations implies, without explanation, that children are capable of consenting to have sex with adults, and some psychologists have argued that such relationships can be healthy under the right circumstances, as long as no coercion is involved.

That is, by the way, a good justification for grooming children. Grooming is just another form of dating in this view.

The rejection of norms and biology itself upends the entire justification for expanding the acceptance of gays into the larger society, as well as presenting enormous problems for people for whom their sexual orientation is actually based upon attraction to people of the same biological sex.

The erasing of heterosexual-homosexual-bisexual as a basis for understanding of sexuality causes many problems for gay males and lesbian females. Today’s gays are accused as transphobic if they are disinterested in relations with a female who identifies as trans “gender” (Female-to-Male). Lesbians have been harassed, assaulted, and raped by males who identify as trans “gender” (Male-to-Female), yet lesbians are too called transphobic for not wanting to have sex with transwomen.

HB6638’s changed definition of sexual orientation would change the meaning of being homosexual. Further alarming is the rising number of detransitioners, mostly young lesbians and gays who identified as trans “gender” and later stopped. A Reddit subgroup for detransitioners has over 47,000 members and the stories many share are gut-wrenching. Yet the LGBTQ+/Transgenders who hijacked the former gay rights movement treat these young homosexuals with scorn. Not one single LGBTQ+ group provides any support resources to detransitioners. Each of these stories began with a young person, often a child, “identifying” as a different “gender.”

HB6638’s expanding the definition of “sexual orientation” to apply to all sorts of ill-defined “identities” (like people who identify as “queer” or “non-binary” genders) makes no sense. Defining sexual orientation according to self-identity makes no sense. One need look no further than the NAMBLA website where a July 2020 essay “Has the Gay Movement Failed?” critiques the 2018 book by Martin Duberman of the same title. The book lays “out the sharp differences between the movement’s earlier liberationist agenda versus its contemporary assimilationist platform.”

And here, Cleghorn gets to the heart of the matter. The alphabet ideology is about a certain kind of liberation: a complete separation of the Will from the body and Nature. The success of the gay rights movement became possible and then a reality because, at base, it was about opening doors, not blowing up the building. As people realized this the idea of keeping people out of polite society was understood to be an injustice.

As people began to see this as a genuine civil rights issue, they changed their minds, and quickly. Gays were no longer seen as freaks who only wanted to indulge their perverse sexual desires, but as people who wanted the same rights as everybody else. In a sense, they joined the melting pot as any seemingly alien immigrant group did in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

That is not the goal of the gender ideologues, and it certainly is not the case with this movement to redefine sexual orientation into the much vaguer and more dangerous “gender” orientation, which is unmoored from anything resembling reality.

The blurring of sex and gender, and of identity from reality, is central to Queer Theory’s quest to deconstruct “systems of oppression” and advance “social justice.” Many homosexuals – gay men and lesbian women – are raising alarms with the growing effort behind bills like HB6638. Groups like the LGB Alliance and Gays Against Groomers, speaking out against the sexualization and medicalization of children and the excesses of gender identity ideology, have launched and are growing. HB6638 has nothing to do with “being more inclusive” or “modernizing the definition” of sexual orientation. This is about imposing an agenda which few understand but many support in the tribal spirit of our times. I urge caution in proceeding further into these troubled waters.

Minnesota’s changes to Human Rights law preceded this troubling change in Connecticut’s law, and many other states are sure to follow. This is a movement, not a few people tweaking laws to make them more clear.

And as sure as the sun rises in the East, the normalization of pedophilia will march onwards to its ultimate goal.