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Gay Rights: Why Is Princeton University’s President Shielding NOM’s Founder?

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Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman refuses to address the fact that a professor under her tenure practices anti-gay hate and uses his position at Princeton University to falsely give credence to his work.

GAY RIGHTS NATIONAL EMERGENCY – AN OPEN LETTER TO PRINCETON PRESIDENT SHIRLEY M. TILGHMAN

 

 

To:

Shirley M. Tilghman, President
Princeton University

smt@princeton.edu 

President Tlighman:

This regards your unconscionable cowardice and/or lack of good character in so far refusing publicly to condemn the malicious nationwide political gay bashing of Princeton University Professor Robert George. I sent you an e-mail in this regard, which you ignored. Separately, I sent an e-mail to Princeton University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua; he also ignored my e-mail. I then called his office; he happened to pick up, acknowledged receipt of my e-mail and said that you would not be commenting.

As a regular contributor to The Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism, I know that one of the most urgently important lessons of the Holocaust is that a society must not wait until the lowest imaginable degradation of ignorance-fueled anti-minority prejudice is reached before taking a stand against such dangerous prejudices.

Though Princeton Professor Robert P. George is not qualified to speak scientifically about the psychology of sexual orientation, he presumes authority to speak on the topic as though he were an expert in it. Many of his published academic papers and articles are actually anti-gay hate literature that have only been published in academic journals and elsewhere because of the ongoing prevalence of ignorance-fueled anti-gay prejudice in the society.

It should nonetheless concern Princeton University when one of its supposed star scholars is publishing junk scholarship with the Princeton University brand name attached. Your institution’s integrity is on the line. By way of example I am going to cite footnote number 10 in Princeton University Professor Robert George’s notorious anti-gay hate essay “What is Marriage?” This scurrilous anti-gay hate literature was co-written by a Princeton Ph.D. candidate, meaning, at Princeton, Professor George is grooming a new generation to perpetuate a corrosive and harmful ignorance-fueled prejudice. Professor George in the aforementioned footnote wrote, “Throughout history, no society’s laws have explicitly forbidden gay marriage. They have not explicitly forbidden it because, until recently, it has not been thought possible.”

The Roman emperors Nero and Elagabalus each were married to men in public ceremonies described by such scribes as Cicero. At a later date, the Theodosian Code (9.7.3) made illegal such same sex relations. Were it not for the Romans one might point at the tradition of berdaches in the cultures of various Native American tribes. If berdaches’ domestic relationships did not correspond precisely to contemporary American marital relationships, neither did Native Americans’ heterosexual marriage-like domestic arrangements.

The cultures of ancient Rome and of the Native Americans hardly exhaust historical examples of same sex relationships being endorsed by societies. While the evidence from ancient Egypt remains incomplete, surviving Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom accounts and other evidence suggest that homosexuality in those periods extended in significance beyond mere physical relations. And, I have not yet mentioned ritualized female pairings among the Nuer of Sudan or ritualized male pairings in the Azande culture.  I trust that you know at least something about historical same-sex relationships in China and Japan.

My main point in this to you is that Princeton University Professor Robert George ignored mountainous scholarship in the field of Cultural Anthropology to allege that ritualized same sex unions had throughout history not existed. He did so in the pages of an academic journal, using his Princeton University associations as credentials, and in order to perpetuate anti-scientific, anti-fact, anti-gay prejudices. Note, please, that Professor George has had professional associations with the anti-gay hate group Focus on the Family, one of whose officials, Tom Minnery was on the floor of the United States Senate during a hearing when under oath called out for falsifying evidence about gay human beings, with intent to see discrimination against them perpetuated in the United States.

While each and every aspect of the very serious injuries Princeton’s Professor Robert George causes to be inflicted on his victims nationwide and beyond is of extreme concern, perhaps no aspect is quite so shocking as Professor George’s complicity in perpetuating nationwide school environments hostile to young LGBT human beings. The website of Professor George’s American Principles Project includes articles that rail against the teaching of humane acceptance values in public schools, with the reason given being that teaching acceptance values are “subterfuges” to promote acceptance of gay human beings. Professor George is publishing this anti-gay hate literature in a social climate where some people of influence state that anti-gay bullying is a “healthy” form of peer pressure. Dr. Rich Swier, who promotes the idea that anti-gay bullying is a “healthy” form of peer pressure, enthusiastically cites Princeton Professor Robert George’s writings on his blog. Here in case you missed the story is a report about the recent anti-gay bullycide of Jamey Rodemeyer.

NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, an organization Professor George started and of which he is Chairman Emeritus, is currently engaging in anti-gay politicking in the very district where Jamey Rodemeyer fell victim to anti-gay bullying. Professor George’s vigorous and sustained activity in this field runs counter to the policies and recommendations issued by every major modern medical and psychological association including the AMA. If you are not familiar with what a student victim of this ignorance suffers, please read my article “Gay Florida Teen, Harassed by Teacher, Tortured by Students, Denied Justice.”

We shall not remain silent while . . . even in the midst of an epidemic of bullycides among gay American teenagers . . .. Princeton University officials continue to enable the monster bigot Professor Robert George.

At this link is the online petition calling for you and other Princeton University Board of Trustee members to repudiate Professor Robert George’s ignorance-fueled anti-gay prejudices. Jamey Rodemeyer couldn’t sign the petition because he is dead. Who knows? Maybe one day he could have attended Princeton.

Shame on you, Princeton University President Tilghman. Shame.

 (image)

Editor’s note: President Tilghman and her office have not responded to repeated requests for comment.

 

New York City-​based novelist and freelance writer Scott Rose’s LGBT-​interest by-​line has appeared on Advocate​.com, PoliticusUSA​.com, The New York Blade, Queerty​.com, Girlfriends and in numerous additional venues. Among his other interests are the arts, boating and yachting, wine and food, travel, poker and dogs. His “Mr. David Cooper’s Happy Suicide” is about a New York City advertising executive assigned to a condom account.

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The U.S. Department of the Interior and Secretary Doug Burgum, as well as the National Park Service and Acting Director Jessica Bowron, are named in the lawsuit filed by attorneys for the Gilbert Baker Foundation and others. Gilbert Baker is the artist who created the rainbow Pride flag.

“In the lawsuit,” The New York Times reported, “the Gilbert Baker Foundation argued that the original Pride flag fell under one of the allowed exceptions: to provide historical context at national monuments. This is the exception that allows Confederate flags to be flown at properties managed by the Park Service, including Gettysburg National Military Park.”

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“This was no careless mistake,” the lawsuit reads, according to a screenshot posted by New York Daily News reporter Molly Crane-Newman. “The government has not removed other historical flags at other national monuments, most notably Confederate flags.”

The suit alleges that the “assault on Stonewall is the latest example in a long line of efforts by the Trump Administration to target the LGBTQ+ community for discrimination and opprobrium.”

“In February 2025, for instance, the administration removed the word ‘transgender’ from prominent sections of the Stonewall monument’s website, as part of its wider campaign to demean and erase the transgender community,” it states.

“The Trump Administration has deleted numerous NPS websites discussing LGBTQ+ history,” it continues, “fired at least one federal employee for displaying a pride flag in his office; banned the use of pronouns in email signatures; renamed a John Lewis-class replenishment oiler named after Harvey Milk, a pioneering gay rights leader who served as a Navy officer and one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States.”

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It also cites what it calls “a particularly absurd example,” in which images of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay — the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb — were flagged for deletion, apparently because the images included the word “Gay.”

The lawsuit alleges a “pattern of systemic targeting of the LGBTQ+ community—combined with the starkly disparate treatment of the Pride flag,” which it claims “demonstrates that the decision to alter the Stonewall monument was not just a mistake. It was based on an impermissible animus.”

Numerous New York elected leaders at all levels, including U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, denounced the administration’s removal of the flag.

The removal became a national flashpoint, drawing hundreds of locals to protest and prompting elected leaders to vow to raise it again.

Activists and officials gathered for multiple demonstrations at the Stonewall National Monument, where they raised a new Pride flag — an act that the Trump administration condemned as a “political stunt.”

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A prominent House Republican who successfully advanced bipartisan legislation to release the Epstein files is predicting there will be more GOP “defections” once the primaries are over.

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Massie added that “quietly and privately, people are telling me they agree with me.”

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Massie also offered several other pointed remarks.

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“When the attorney general is reduced to a stack of pre-prepared insults to deliver, and when the DOJ is responding to my every tweet with additional unredactions, I don’t think I’m going to change what I’m doing just yet,” he said.

Massie described Bondi as looking “weak and frustrated” at the hearing “when she started talking about the Dow Jones, which has literally nothing to do with her job.”

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Far-right extremist leader Nick Fuentes — who brands himself “America First” — once again is putting President Donald Trump and the GOP on notice, saying that Republicans are “gonna get destroyed” in the 2026 midterms and by 2028 it will be “Democrats on steroids.”

“We are headed for an utter and total defeat in the midterms,” Fuentes predicted on his Rumble streaming show on Monday, urging his supporters to not vote in November. Fuentes has 1.2 million followers on the X social media platform.

He said that “the Democrats will take the House, and then it is impeachment City. We are taking a trip to impeachment City.”

Democrats, Fuentes declared, will win the House and the Senate, and “then it’s impeachments, subpoenas, depositions, investigations. Trump might even be removed from office.”

“When all is said and done, he might even be pulled by his own people. That — there is a non-zero chance. As a matter of fact, there’s a good chance that’s gonna happen.”

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“Trump is getting impeached,” Fuentes continued. “Vance is getting impeached. Hegseth is — they’re all getting impeached. They’re all being subpoenaed. They’re all being deposed.”

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“My message in ’26, you could take it or leave it. Don’t vote. Don’t vote, do not vote in the midterms. The Republicans have to lose. They have to lose. They have to crash and burn. A cleansing fire is the only thing that will save us. It cannot be fixed.”

“F — — Trump, f — — MAGA, f — —  all this stuff. It can’t be fixed. If it could have been fixed, it would have been fixed in 2025, but it wasn’t.”

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Fuentes predicted that “in two years, this is gonna be the most unpopular administration in history. It’s gonna be a repeat of 2020. That’s what we’re looking at here.”

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Fuentes has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “white nationalist,” an “admirer of fascists,” and someone who “frequently relies on antisemitic tropes.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, “Fuentes has used his platforms to make numerous antisemitic, racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments,” and spreads “white supremacist propaganda.”

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