HRC targets pro-gay activist whose views aren't extreme enough

Robert O. Lopez is openly bisexual, although he has a wife and two children. Raised by lesbian parents, the Cal State-Northridge English professor advocates civil unions and foster parenting for homosexual couples. But because he opposes homosexual couples raising children of their own, he has been blacklisted by pro-LGBT organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and GLAAD.

HRC featured Lopez in its “Export of Hate” report and in a recent email sent to its members. The report calls him a “rising star on the international anti-LGBT scene,” along with several other fallacious allegations, including an affiliation with the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), that Lopez rebutted in an article published at First Things.

In a member-wide email sent earlier this month, HRC claimed Lopez used anti-gay rhetoric at a World Congress of Families event.

“I do not belong to the World Congress of Families, have never attended a World Congress of Families event, and the quotation they attributed to me had nothing to do with my job at CSU Northridge,” Lopez said.

The HRC email incited a firestorm of angry emails sent to Lopez and CSU Northridge’s president, provost, and English Department chair. HRC’s YouTube page also includes a 55 second video with clips of Lopez sharing his views.

WORLD previously reported that pro-family activist Scott Lively claims he received death threats after HRC published its report. Lopez believes his life is endangered as well.

“Being completely isolated like this, and then having to worry every time I leave my home—and my wife is there with the newborn—and not knowing whether I’m going to get killed, it’s really hard,” he told The Daily Signal.

Lopez doesn’t affiliate with any organization and supports his family of four in Los Angeles on a $65,000 salary. He doesn’t have any big money backing him. But HRC still views him as a threat. “I have super natural powers nobody could have guessed,” he quipped in an article published in American Thinker.

Lopez’s views make him a maverick in the LGBT debate. While HRC and GLAAD have rejected him, his support for civil unions and foster parenting for gay couples places him outside pro-family organizations like NOM. Instead, Lopez advocates for what he identifies as children’s rights.

“My refrain has been, for years: children have an inalienable right to a mother and father, cannot be bought or sold, and are entitled to know their origins,” Lopez said. “Whether it is straight people or gay people using divorce, surrogacy, trafficking or any other means to deny people these rights, I oppose it.”

His comparison of homosexual parents to slave owners has especially drawn criticism from GLAAD and HRC. Lopez says slave owners bought people just as gay couples buy children through surrogacy. “It is common in France and Belgium for people to use the term esclavage, or slavery, in describing surrogacy arrangements,” Lopez said. “It was not racism or hard labor that the abolitionists found abhorrent—it was the violation of natural bonds to family and ethnic origins.”

Lopez’s position first elicited criticism when he published his Public Discourse essay “Growing Up with Two Moms” in August 2012. Lopez said he was raised in a loving home but his childhood was hard and confusing. Though he didn’t address gay marriage or adoption, the essay sparked more than two years of harassment, Lopez said.

Though he refuses to stop advocating his position internationally, he’s worried about his safety.

“It’s endangering me and my family,” Lopez told The Daily Signal. “I don’t have a lot of money, I’m not rich, and I don’t have a big organization with tons of money that can help me and support me.”