The Man Who Wants to Kill Gays
Gary North is a business partner and close friend with Ron Paul. He’s praised by the grossly misnamed Mises Institute and Lew Rockwell, who was alt-Right before the alt-Right, has honored him. But the clique of fake libertarians are praising a man who wants to have most readers stoned to death.
Gary North has been prolific about his hatred for gay people and quite clear in his intentions to have them stoned to death under his version of a Christian anarchist society. I will use one of his books as a source in this posting, though there are many others. In his book Leviticus, he writes that “defiance — the professed lack of any fear of God — is basic to all homosexuality.” (xxii) His amateur Freudianism is showing, and it isn’t pretty.
North whines the Holiness Code of Leviticus is “not taken seriously by well over nine-tenths of the evangelical Christian community. This is the problem that this commentary seeks to overcome.” (pxxv) This is important as it is in Leviticus that the Old Testament commands stoning gay men to death. Unless North can “rescue” the Holiness Code as applicable to modern life he can’t promote the public execution of gay men. He is quite clear that without Leviticus there is no excuse to kill gays:
“On what biblical basis can a Christian speak of legitimate civil sanctions against homosexuality if the Book of Leviticus is automatically dismissed? Natural law? But the ancient Greeks accepted the legitimacy of homosexuality with only a few restrictions, yet they (the Hellenistic-era Stoics) invented natural law theory. So, the Christian world has a problem. The average evangelical suspects — though he is really not quite sure — that the Bible authorizes civil sanctions against homosexuality. The sanction required by Leviticus is public execution. Already, the evangelical is growing nervous. But if he repudiates the civil sanction established by Leviticus, on what biblical basis can he assert that some other civil penalty should be imposed?” (p. xxv-xxvi)
North says unless Christians can justify the Levitical Holiness Code for today “they had better learn to live with (and perhaps die with) AIDS and the new killer strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis that AIDS-carriers also carry.” (xxvii) Of course, the bullshit hysteria North, Paul, Rothbard, and Rockwell promoted turned out to be as bogus as the histrionics of Paul Ehrlich.
Channelling the hateful Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, North wrote: “God announced this law because He despises homosexuality and homosexuals. He hates the sin and the unrepentant sinner. He does not hate the sin and love the sinner. He hates the sin and hates the sinner. This is why there is hell: God hates unrepentant sinners. God is indeed a homophobe. He hates the practice and those who practice it.” (xxix) North claims that ignoring God’s word means modern Christians “have an escalating problem: AIDS is not irrelevant.” (xxvii) In fact, AIDS diagnosed cases peaked in 1991 and AIDS-related deaths peaked in 1995. Both have downward trends since then. This is not an “escalating” problem but a declining one. And, if Mr. North is meaning to imply that AIDS is God’s punishment for being gay, because God hates gays, then God is also a racist. African-Americans suffer a far higher infection rate than whites. So does God hate blacks?
North justifies executing gays on the basis that this is restorative justice: restitution to the victim. He argues (p.377, see footnote) the crimes demanding execution are murder, bestiality, passing children through Molech’s fire [good thing we can stop that!], homosexual acts, wizardry [good bye Harry Potter], and blasphemy.”
North says these offenses require death because it is restitution. “The death penalty is God’s required means of enforcing earthly restitution for certain crimes, irrespective of the opinion of any victim. The convicted criminal is to be transferred from the civil court to God’s heavenly court. The means of this transfer is execution.” In the middle of that, after “victim” he has a footnote number referring to the capital offenses, including “homosexual acts.”
North dismisses the idea this is restitution to human victims of a crime, as they don’t matter. It is a punishment inflicted “irrespective of the opinion of any victim.” This is because people are looking at it wrong. It is restitution to God. “Death is restitution to God. Eternal death is God’s ultimate sanction, and it is applied to every infraction.” (p.375) He argues you can’t recognize the rights of minority “without an equal extension of civil rights to God. God is much more concerned about His own civil rights than about man’s presumed civil rights.” Yes, North’s God is as a nasty as North. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
North tries to outline his theory of rights, but begins with what restrictions must be placed on people. “Civil rights in a society must begin with the blasphemy law. If God’s name and reputation are not protected by law, then no man’s name and reputation will be protected for very long.” (p.376) Hmm, history has shown that claim to be entirely wrong. Rights are not grants of freedom to North, they are boundaries: “A civil right is a boundary protected by the threat of civil sanctions. Covenantally, any society that does not honor God’s boundaries will find itself under God’s negative corporate sanctions.”
He says blasphemy is “judicially the equivalent of an assault” and “the State must intervene and impose the ultimate form of restitution: the death penalty. The criminal is thereby delivered into God’s heavenly court for final judgment.” (p.379) He goes as far as saying that killing blasphemers is the very foundation of all civil rights: “A public assault on God’s name is therefore a capital crime, the archetype of all civil rights laws. If God’s rights are not defended by the civil order, then no one’s rights are safe.” (p 380)
North does note that God’s method of execution is stoning people, though it is “a penalty that outrages modern Christians, who regard it (and, by implication, the God who required it) as barbaric.” (p.371) It is a penalty he upholds for all capital offenses, including homosexuality. “Biblically, the answer is obvious: public execution by stoning. How much clearer could God’s law be? But God’s word is not taken seriously in this matter. Its very clarity constitutes an embarrassment for those who call themselves Christians. They would much prefer a bit of vagueness.” (p. 381) He argues: “If the law is still binding, so is the biblically specified sanction: death by stoning.” (p. 336)
He damns modern Christians for not being willing to kill other people with their own hands:
God’s mandated method of execution — public stoning by the witnesses whose words condemned the criminal — is regarded as perverse even by those few Christians who still defend the legitimacy of the death penalty They do not believe that God requires the trial’s hostile witnesses to cast the first stones. But He does: “The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people. So thou shalt put the evil away from among you” (Deut. 17:7). Like twentieth-century humanists, Christians today regard God’s mandated sanctions as barbaric; in this case, public execution by citizens. Why is this regarded as barbaric? The critics do not say. They do not think that have to say.“Everyone can see that such a thing is barbaric!”
This law, if enforced, would place enormous responsibility into citizens’ hands, both titerally and figuratively. Christians today want to avoid such a fearful responsibility. They want the execution performed by some faceless bureaucrat behind closed doors, which is what God’s law prohibits. Christians do not want the witnesses — those whose public words condemned the person to death — to suffer the psychological pressure of having to enforce their own words of condemnation. The witnesses’ public judicial words are not to be enforced by their public judicial sanctions. Their words killed the person judicially but the work of their hands is not supposed to kill the person biologically. The witnesses must not be burdened by the enormous emotional pressure of having to act out in public the judiaal implications of their words. Word and deed are to be kept radicatly separate. The dirty work is to be done by a hireling, a professional executioner paid by the State.
God’s law identifies the witnesses as God’s agents, as well as the victim’s agents. They are His agents both in their capacity as bringers of a lawsuit and as public executioners. They are to deliver the condemned person into God’s heavenly court. In contrast, modern jurisprudence sees the witnesses as agents solely of the State. Then the State hires its own sanctions-bringer to execute judgment. The State
consolidates its power by relieving the citizenry of their responsibilities. Not all of these responsibilities are economic.” (p.336)
Why do some libertarians continue to tolerate him? Maybe they just aren’t that libertarian to begin with. Is it so hard to believe that some paleoconservatives, with all the usual hates and prejudices of the Religious Right, set up a fake “libertarian” organization in order to infiltrate and change libertarianism into a version of their own narrow-minded, hateful theology? What’s is doubly sad is so often they drag poor Mises into the middle and yet his views and theirs are rather different. They besmirch the reputation of a real classical liberal, in order to disguise their own bigoted hate.
All quotes can be found in Leviticus, a commentary on the Book of Leviticaus, written and published by Gary North.
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